Computing · Magnetic Storage

HDD Cost Collapse

The price of keeping bits around, down ~8 billion-fold in real terms.

Ended — The cheapest drive ever logged. It was never beaten before the survey went dark.

• $87M/GB (1956) → ~1¢/GB (2023)
• Stalled 2011–14: Thailand floods
• Constant 2020 dollars, not nominal
• Record unbeaten since May 2023

Hard drives are a quiet case study in compounding engineering. Areal density, better read-write heads, cleaner mechanics and sheer manufacturing scale took a gigabyte from about $87 million in 1956, the year IBM shipped the RAMAC, to just over a cent in 2023: a fall of more than eight billion-fold. These are constant 2020 dollars, which matters more than it sounds, because across a span this long nominal prices hide roughly a further tenfold of the decline. The series is John McCallum’s price survey, the standard reference for historical storage cost, as published by Our World in Data. Two things are worth noticing. First, the curve is not smooth. Prices stalled from 2011 to 2014, when floods across Thailand knocked out something like a third of world drive production and a typical 1TB drive jumped from roughly $60 to $160; the industry needed about two years to work through it. Second, the fall has slowed sharply. The eight years to 2023 delivered about 3x, where the comparable stretch around 2000 delivered 50x, as flash took over the work that rewards speed and left hard drives competing on bulk capacity alone. The line stops in 2023, but that is where the record stops, not the survey. McCallum kept pricing drives until July 2024 and never again found one cheaper than the $99.99 eight-terabyte Western Digital he logged in May 2023; the cheapest drive of 2024 was ten percent dearer. Then his site went dark, in late 2025, leaving that May 2023 price as the last entry in a sixty-eight-year ledger.

Source: John C. McCallum via Our World in Data

Download the data: hdd_cost.csv · hdd_cost.json

All curves · The chart is drawn in your browser and needs JavaScript. Every number it plots is in the table above.