[LINK] Hard disk storage: 8 GB costs as much as a roll of toilet paper

[Robin Whittle]

Cost reductions and performance improvements continue remorselessly
in the hard drive field.  This chart:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hard_drive_capacity_over_time.svg

indicates 10^5 improvement in 3 decades - nearly 50% improvement per
annum.

Rather then track IT cost-effectiveness increases in dollars, I think
it is interesting to use other units, such as the price of a
toothbrush or a good apple.


In The Age yesterday was a Officeworks advert for multiple items.
Alongside each other were:

  Western Digital USB 2.0 1 terabyte hard drive       $95.00
  Tork Advanced Toilet Rolls T4 16 pack               $11.98

For the price of a roll of toilet paper we can get 8 gigabytes of
hard disk storage.  Admittedly, this is *advanced* loo paper, 400
dual ply sheets per roll.  So the modern industrial world can produce
20 megabytes of hard drive storage about as easily as a sheet of
toilet paper.  The Bible or "The Lord of the Rings", uncompressed, is
about 4 megabytes.

A terabyte is like having a 2.8km square piece of 1mm graph paper and
colouring in the squares arbitrarily.  20MB is like a 13 metre square
of this graph paper.

For the price of two toothbrushes we can buy a 2 gigabyte USB Flash
memory device.  $55 inc. GST buys 16 Gigabytes - so that's 58
megabytes per Freddo Frog (Q20 bulk pack on discount).

According to:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory

between 2005 and 2009, five years, capacity per chip rose from 1Gbit
to 256Gbit - that's tripling the capacity per year.

DRAM is less than $50 a gigabyte.

A quad-core Intel i7-860 CPU costs $348, which is about the cost of
taxi fares to and from the airport from some of Melbourne's southern
suburbs.  This is rated at 2.8GHz, and each of its cores attempts to
execute multiple instructions per clock cycle.  Some instructions
take multiple clock cycles and many would be delayed while waiting
for cache and external DRAM.

At 2.8GHz, the chip has as many clock cycles a second as there are
seconds in most people's lifetime - 88.7 years.  Each clock cycle
takes as long as it takes light to travel about 11cm - and it travels
around the world 7 times a second.  i7 CPUs go up to 3.33GHz, and
some people push them much faster still.

  - Robin