Data Storage Costs Over Time

The manufacturing and marketing efficiencies that drive the pricing of hard drives seems to have changed over time.

Data storage costs over time.

Over the past 50 years data storage development has blown past barrier after barrier to give us denser higher capacity hard drives and flash storage at ever cheaper costs. Let s start with taking a look at cloud in order to meet budget requirements while maintaining the value of data to the business some storage professionals have considered cloud based storage for storing second copies of. The cloud offers essentially an infinite amount of data. This gives us a benchmark price for raw hdd storage today.

The list price for the 3 tb barracuda drive is 99 99 making the price per gb 0 033. Factoring in scalability technology refresh and operating costs like power administration floor space and support renewal over time can make a big difference in the storage acquired hiles says. For example aws storage services portfolio offers options to help you lower pricing based on how frequently you access data and the performance you need to retrieve it. Per gb storage or the space taken by the files and network transfer or essentially the cost of downloading the files.

A dramatic drop in storage and associated data transfer costs would enable smaller companies to run analysis on large data sets and move more data to the cloud. The file sharing services we steadily depend on for on the go access is costing companies an average of 450 per user. Over the last 30 years space per unit cost has doubled roughly every 14 months increasing by an order of magnitude every 48 months. The data on this chart was sourced from the current price of these drives on amazon.

But what about the specific costs associated with storing your data on tape or in the cloud over a longer period of time. Cloud storage costs stem from two main sources. To optimize your savings choose the right combinations of storage solutions that help you reduce costs while preserving performance security and durability. According to one infographic the average cost of storing a single tb of file data is 3 351 a year that cost potentially skyrockets because of supporting technologies.

The drive models selected were consumer drives like those we typically use in our data centers. The internet made the cloud available as a service.