History of Backing Storage

Seagate ST506 hard disk drive

May 20, 1980

It cost $4,315 back then (in today's dollars).

3.5 Inch Floppy Disk

Jan 1, 1981

Nowadays, a 1.44MB one would cost about $10 per pack of 10.

CD-ROM

Jan 1, 1984

It would be about $5 to buy a pack of 10 blank discs.

IBM 9345 hard disk drive

Nov 1, 1990

IBM's 9345 hard disk drive is introduced. Codenamed "Sawmill," it was the first hard disk drive to use magneto-resistive heads.

MiniDisc

Sep 1, 1992

It would have been $12 to buy one blank minidisc back then.

CompactFlash

Jan 1, 1994

A modern 64GB card would cost about $50.

DVD

Jan 1, 1995

A pack of 50 DVDs nowadays would cost about $15.

USB Flash Drive

Jan 1, 2000

A modern 128GB USB 3.0 flash drive would be about $60.

IBM Microdrive

Jan 1, 2001

A 1GB drive in 2001 would have cost $360.

Blu-Ray Optical Disk

Jan 1, 2003

A pack of 25 25GB discs nowadays would be about $25

First 1TB Hard Drive

Jan 1, 2009

A hard drive of similar capacity today would be about $35.

NVME Internal SSDs

Jul 1, 2013

A 512GB consumer NVME SSD would cost around $350.