EARLY 1990s ? As a VMS systems manager, I decide to replace a couple of 300MB and 450 MB dishwasher-sized drives with tabletop 1 GB SCSIs. Cost of the full-height 5.25? drive with enclosure and power supply is $1000 and is about the size of a breadbox. Wow! Turn the page to 2002. A 200 GB external drive using Firewire lists out at $400. The IBM 1GB Microdrive, about the size of a matchbook and a bit long in the tooth (having been first intro'd '98) prices around $299.
We're less than eighteen months away from hitting a performance plateau in the drive industry. If you don't believe me, believe IBM. They're out of the disk drive rat race, having sold off their stake to Hitachi. If we use the 80-120 GB drive as the ?typical? standard of what goes into a desktop machine and double capacity twice over the next two years, the drive of 2005 will weigh in at 320-480 GB. For a single drive that's at least 100 hundred DVDs worth of high-quality video, thousands of pictures, mind-boggling amounts of e-mail. Multiply by two or three computers in the home as well as additional on-board storage in music and video entertainment centers for at least a terabyte or two of storage per household.
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