In 1957, $1,000 bought you one-four-millionth of a byte of computer memory. A fraction of a single byte. Today, that same $1,000 buys 94 terabytes of hard drive space. The price of digital storage has collapsed by a factor of 3.48 trillion. No other technology in human history has delivered this magnitude of cost reduction.
How Did Storage Costs Fall 3.48 Trillion Times?
The numbers defy comprehension. What once cost more than the combined GDP of every nation on Earth now costs pocket change. Hard drives, SSDs, and RAM have all followed exponential decline curves that compound year after year. These aren't percentage declines. These are civilizational shifts in what computing makes possible.
Why Does Storage Get 35% Cheaper Every Year?
The mechanism driving this collapse is relentless technological iteration. Memory prices have fallen an average of 35% per year for 66 years straight. Hard drives declined 29% per year. This isn't Moore's Law. Storage cost curves have outpaced even that famous prediction. Each generation of manufacturing shrinks features, increases density, and drives costs toward zero.
Why Don't We Notice How Cheap Storage Has Become?
Most people have no idea that their smartphone holds more storage than entire corporate data centers did in 1990. That year, one terabyte of memory cost $90 million. We adapted so quickly to abundance that we forgot the scarcity. When your laptop has more storage than NASA had during the Moon landing, the extraordinary becomes invisible.
How Cheap Will Storage Be in 15 Years?
If current trends continue, hard drive storage will cost under $1 per terabyte within 15 years. At that price point, never deleting anything becomes economically rational. Every photo, every video, every document you create could be stored forever for pennies. The cost of remembering everything is approaching zero.
The plummeting cost of storage represents something profound about human progress. Every generation inherits capabilities that would have seemed impossible to the one before. Your children will grow up in a world where storing a lifetime of memories costs less than a cup of coffee. This is technology fulfilling its highest purpose: making yesterday's miracles tomorrow's assumptions.