Moore's Law, Storage density and Consumer markets

As predicted by Moore's Law, storage density continues its exponential march through the decades. Abundant storage creates interesting possibilities. We can download and carry our contacts, documents, music, videos, etc. with us for anytime, anywhere access. Soon, we would be able to carry most of a library, or as we at Webaroo believe , even the better part of the web with us.

At Webaroo, we're big fans of cheaper storage. Like many of you, we watch with interest the trends in storage and memory prices. To make it easier for us (and you) to track these prices, we composed our own, entirely unscientific measure -- the Webaroo Storage Index.

The Index (US$/GB) will periodically monitor the value of commercially available storage and memory. If you find prices better than we do, please tell us (feedback@webaroo.com).

First, here's a quick historical view of the decreasing cost of disk drives:

...And flash memory:

Data source: http://www.jcmit.com/diskprice.htm

And here's what it means for us today....

Products with the lowest Index

Disk Drive:

Date: 22nd Jan 07
Time: 0500 hrs
Western Digital 160 GB Hard Disk Drive, US$ 60  (Index  0.375)

USB Flash Memory:

Date: 22nd Jan 07
Time: 0500 hrs
Transcend 8GB USB Flash Drive, US$ 80 (Index 10)

If you know better, do let us know (feedback@webaroo.com).