Moore's Law, Magnetic-Style

Much ado is regularly made in the tech press about Moore's Law, a forecast of the pace of single-chip transistor integration increase over time first made by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965. Comparatively little attention is focused on the rate of capacity growth over time (said another way, cost-per-capacity) for magnetic storage, which is a shame, because I think that it's at least as impressive and perhaps even more so. To drive the point home, CNET has published a concise retrospective of the early days of the HDD industry (Slashdot discussion here).

At the moment, my empirical research suggests that the most cost-effective 3.5" HDD capacities are in the 250-300 GByte range (largest-available 3.5" drives currently tout 500 GByte capacities), and their retail cost is in the 33 cent-per-GByte after-rebate range. In contrast, IBM's 3340 storage system (available in 35 and 70 MByte capacities) cost, in 1973, roughly $7.81 per MByte according to CNET. 23 years of technology development = a ~23,000x lower cost per MByte. And PMR (perpendicular magnetic recording promises to continue the trend. Amazing.