Michael Komo

Backblaze posts some good stuff on HD pricing and reliability. Here's a good chart from their data: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/ They also link to this great (logarithmic) chart: http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte-update TL;DR: price hasn't been dropping by half annually, but prices have come down from ~$0.70/GB to < $0.03/GB now. So roughly a factor of 20 over 13-14 years, somewhere in the neighborhood of 25% improvements compounded annually over that time.

Thank you for your comments. However, Migadu is not intended to be "cheap". That is not the selling point of it. We used to use Google Apps for multiple domains for our starup projects, ideas etc. Switching between these multiple accounts was becoming ridiculous and complex. Then, they made it $5 per account. We actually had many addresses but only two users. Our total cost of that would be measured in hundreds of $ which def would not be worth it. What I personally dislike regarding other services is that they claim storage as one of the most important selling points but then do not account for the price drop per GB. Since GMail for work launched (2006?), the cost per GB dropped more than sixty fold: http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte-update Any update in price? Nope. And then, the price of Google Apps (Gmail) are global. We have clients in Zimbabwe for instance. $5 per month per account is not the same as it would be in the US. Yet if a company from Zimbabwe uses a @gmail address, it won't be taken serious. Migadu is profitable since a while ago, and real money is relative. We're not after exits and TechCrunch, just doing what we like and hacking at it daily. :) Pays the bills. Ironically, we are also in Switzerland, where living expenses are among the highest in the world. Thanks for the assertions though! :)

It wasn't a VCR with a hard drive, VCR's for the most part used an analogue format unless you had some of the few digital ones that were super expensive and used for productions. In 1999 making a cost effective DVR couldn't have been that easy, the hardware was pretty puny and storage was expensive. A ~16 GB hard drive alone in 1999 would cost 250-350$ [0] A TV tuner card capable of MPEG-2 encoding on chip would cost around 300-400$, at least that was the price in around 2000-2001 when I got a hercules DVR card. The software ones required an Intel MMX CPU to do encoding and those were both cutting edge and expensive, so the fact that TiVO managed to release a viable consumer product at a reasonable price was pretty f-ning amazing. [0] http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte | http://www.jcmit.com/diskprice.htm | http://edition.cnn.com/1999/TECH/computing/12/30/harddrives.2000.idg/i… | http://www.storagereview.com/articles/9907/990719ataroundup1999.html I think people don't realize that in 1999 Pentium II just came out and intel was still producing non-embedded versions of the 486.

I think the the "100% Go" stuff is appealing in that you just have one file that works across OSes, with minimal screwing around. For things that become part of the OS, yes, I'd rather they come via some install approach that includes the necessary integration. But for anything else, I think a lot of our packaging approaches are dedicated to saving disk space and RAM, which is something that matters way less to me now than it did 15-20 years ago when CPAN and APT were designed. In 2000, disk prices were circa $10/GB [1]; now we're looking at $0.50/GB of zippy SSD [2] or $0.03/GB of spinning rust [3]. RAM is similarly about 2 orders of magnitude cheaper. [4] Given that, it makes a lot more sense to burn space to minimize the chance of a library version conflict or other packaging issue. Another thing that has changed greatly is the pace of updates. 15-20 years ago, weekly releases sounded impossible to most. Now it's common, and some places are releasing hourly or faster. [5] Thanks to things like GitHub, the whole notion of a release is getting hazy: I see plenty of things where you just install from the latest; every merge to master is in effect a new release. Given that, I think both Go and Docker are pioneering approaches that are much more in sync with the current computing environment. I'm excited to see where they get to. [1] http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte-update [2]…

Looking at this chart[0], my guess would be around 1997. [0] https://mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte-update

https://jcmit.net/diskprice.htm chronological list, there is also https://mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte-update

500KB/page at $0.02/page = $20.97/GB. HDD is $0.01-0.03/GB, SSD is $0.10-0.25/GB, BD/DVD are $0.02-0.10/GB, respectively, at retail prices and before counting redundancy. $20/GB was as far back for HDD as Oct 1999, which by the way fell further to around $7.50 next year in Oct 2000[1]. Yeah interesting but 10-100 fold density improvement would be nice... 1: https://mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte

As a very rough ballpark, hard drive cost was around $1/GB, putting a single copy of everything around a half million dollars. Honestly quite a bit less then I expected for back then. Of course there are tons of other costs, but still not unreasonable for a Walmart size company. http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte

> In '95 consumer grade computers were shipping with between 512MB and 1GB. Do you have a source for that? I bought a consumer grade computer in 1995 and it only had 120MB of disk space. And the historical prices suggest that 250MB was beyond consumer prices until ~1995. http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte suggests 250MB would have been >$500 until 1994. Which is nowhere near "consumer" price.

The price of disk has dropped at nearly the same pace as ram. As has the cost of compute. At the same time data growth has increased faster than either has dropped... so I'm not really sure the price argument holds water. If I can buy ram at 1/100th the cost but I need to store 500x more data... that isn't a net win on cost. From ~$1000.00/gb to $0.03/gb http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte-update

In the year 2000 storage cost about $12/GB [1]. This article claims 10s of TB, so let's say 20 TB, which is the most conservative possible estimate. 20 TB = 20000 GB. At $12/GB, that comes out to $240,000. That doesn't include retransmission cost (for busted drives) or shipping. I'm not sure the analysis is correct here. Presumably their minimum commit was a lot lower than $240k, because otherwise they wouldn't have shrunk from just using the connection. They probably saved a lot of money by doing it their way. [1] http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte * I wasn't around then so I don't actually know. * * It also depends what part of the year they needed to do the transfer. By [1], costs had dropped to $8/GB by the end of the year.

Admittedly, it would have been a lot of drives. Back in circa 2000, according to http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte, 20 Gigabyte Drives were in vogue @$200/pop. So, a Terabyte would have been 50 drives, 10 Terabytes @500 Drives. 10s of terabytes at a minimum 1000 drives. I'm beginning to question how "simple" an operation this might have been after all....

I would be interested in seeing the log of the prices on the vertical axis. The curve seems to fit the exponential decline in prices that I expect to see. I think the difference in regimes would be more clear cut that way. Just picking the end points and the middle, I see: (11 cents, 2009), (5 cents, 2013), (2.8 cents, 2017). So it went from slightly more than halving in cost in the first 4 years (55% reduction) to slightly less than halving in cost in the second 4 years (44% reduction). There's definitely a bit of a slowdown there, but not the huge difference that the article claims. Of course, the first half includes the Thailand flood, and the second half doesn't. Googling for some historical data leads me to http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte, which claims that (from 1980-2010), the cost of a gigabyte has been halving in about 14 months, which is closer to the decay pre-Thailand flood.