Data Storage Costs Over Time

According to one infographic the average cost of storing a single tb of file data is 3 351 a year.

Data storage costs over time.

But while storage hardware is becoming more affordable the cost of file storage with all the associated costs continues to be a burden. To optimize your savings choose the right combinations of storage solutions that help you reduce costs while preserving performance security and durability. The data confirms it. 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.

The data on this chart was sourced from the current price of these drives on amazon. The manufacturing and marketing efficiencies that drive the pricing of hard drives seems to have changed over time. Cloud storage costs stem from two main sources. 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.

The drive models selected were consumer drives like those we typically use in our data centers. Data storage then and now as the size of storage drives shrink capacity increases dramatically. There is a very strong exponential correlation in space cost ratio r 0 9916. Here is a look at how data storage has changed over the last six decades.

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. Per gb storage or the space taken by the files and network transfer or essentially the cost of downloading the files. The internet made the cloud available as a service. 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 list price for the 3 tb barracuda drive is 99 99 making the price per gb 0 033. Storage capacity is billed in units of the average daily amount of data stored in gigabytes gb over a monthly period. This gives us a benchmark price for raw hdd storage today.