Falling Hard Drive prices

Drive Sizes with lowest $/GB

It'd be a boring graph, but it's interesting to note that if you account for the inverse curves above, what you find is that the best values in hard drives, from 2003 to 2008, have consistently been in the $100-$120 range. The capacity of the drives had grown over time, but the price per drive had remained more or less constant.

Late 2008 was an anomaly in that the best deals remained 500 GB drives, instead of the expected 750 GB or 1 TB drives. These smaller-than-expected drives had moved lower down the price chain: a 500 GB drive for $55 was a better deal than a 1 TB drive for $130. By early 2009, though, 1 TB drives could be found in the $80-$90 price range.