Memory Cost
By
Frank Bolton Phillips
NT1110
Friday 6p.m.

This is to help me discover and appreciate the difference in the cost of RAM and ROM in today’s market as well as where is where it came from and where it is going. It is easy to find information on this subject as everyone seems to want in on the computer boom and profit from the ever growing demand for faster computers with huge memory. Ten years ago you would have found yourself spending over $2,000 to get just 1GB of RAM. As computer manufacturers recoup cost of R&D, the prices start to drop. Today it would only cost around $20 to purchase the same 1GB of DDR3 providing considerable savings over a decade ago. What appears to be the best deal for the money is 2GB on RAM which runs around $40 and slows enough memory to run most applications.
There are other types of memory available to all of us if you’re willing to pay the price of admission. For example, some of the more exotic types of RAM can still run hundreds, even thousands of dollars. For instance, I found Super Talent 1TB STT RAID DRIVE GS RAID0 for $4,815.00 on Memory Suppliers.com. They also offer iRam 2GB (2 x 1GB) DDR2 SDRAM PC2-5300 667MHz for $119.00. I find this is a very nice web site that is easy to navigate through and find and compare the memory you’re looking for.
The following table I got from Archive Builders web site. It shows the growth to cost difference for 32 years. This was determined by the increase of the density of disks by 60% a year with an average decrease in price of 37.5%. The 60% increase is based on the growth predictions for MR head technology by IBM, which had increased its areal bit density at a ret of 60% per year since 1989 and projects the same rate to continue into the foreseeable future.
Projected Magnetic Disk Prices Year | Cost for 1 GigaByte =
1,000 MBytes
(Storage for
2 Scanned
File Cabinets) | Cost for 1 TeraByte =
1,000 GBytes
(Storage for
2,000 Scanned
File Cabinets) | 1992 | 1,000.00 | 1,000,000.00 | 1993 | 625.00 | 625,000.00 | 1994 | 390.63 | 390,625.00 | 1995 | 244.14 | 244,140.63 | 1996 | 152.59 | 152,587.89 | 1997 | 95.37 | 95,367.43 | 1998 | 59.60 | 59,604.64 | 1999 | 37.25 | 37,252.90 | 2000 | 23.28 | 23,283.06 | 2001 | 14.55 | 14,551.92 | 2002 | 9.09 | 9,094.95 | 2003 | 5.68 | 5,684.34 | 2004 | 3.55 | 3,552.71 | 2005 | 2.22 | 2,220.45 | 2006 | 1.39 | 1,387.78 | 2007 | 0.87 | 867.36 | 2008 | 0.54 | 542.10 | 2009 | 0.34 | 338.81 | 2010 | 0.21 | 211.76 | 2011 | 0.13 | 132.35 | 2012 | 0.08 | 82.72 | 2013 | 0.05 | 51.70 | 2014 | 0.03 | 32.31 | 2015 | 0.02 | 20.19 | 2016 | 0.01 | 12.62 | 2017 | 0.01 | 7.89 | 2018 | 0.00 | 4.93 | 2019 | 0.00 | 3.08 | 2020 | 0.00 | 1.93 | 2021 | 0.00 | 1.20 | 2022 | 0.00 | 0.75 | 2023 | 0.00 | 0.47 | 2024 | 0.00 | 0.29 |

There are many sources available to choose from to see the projected growth of computer memory. This is just two of them that I find easy to read and understand as well as believe are credible. Further review brings out that the cost of a MegaByte of RAM is now nearing the one dollar mark where twenty-five years ago it was one dollar for each Byte. At around 8 million bytes in a MegaByte and only 8 bits in a Byte, the cost of per bit of RAM has dropped by a rate of one-million-to-one over the past 25 years.
On Crucial.com I found that there is now 3TB hard drives available. If we apply Moore’s law, we can estimate that we will have 100TB drives available in about ten to eleven years. When I added it up I came up with 96TB in 10 years. Here is a bit of information to support my estimate.
An article that came out in 2010 stated that Seagate, that produced the Cheetah 15K.5, 75 GB hard drive, stated that the potential of HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording) could allow 50x the amount of data that PMR technology allows. PMR allows for a top capacity of about 5-6TB per drive. Looking at this, it is easy to see the HAMR would allow for as much as 300TB per drive if the 50x increase holds true. And this is believed possible by Seagate SVP Mark Re to be in the 2020-2025 time frame, making it possible in the next ten years.
When you compare this to the estimate I did using Moore’s Law, it is easy to see that it is completely possible to have the 100TB capacity or more in the next decade.

References
RAMSEEKER (2013) RAMSEEKER Cheapest Memory Upgrades Compared. Publisher unknown. Retrieved on Jan 25, 2013 from http://www.ramseeker.com/what-is-the-cost-of-ram-for-pc/
Gilheany, Steve. (1998). Archive builders. Archive Planning. Volume 2, number 11, 1998. Retrieved from http://www.archivebuilders.com/aba004.html
Gruener, Wolfgang. (2010) Seagate: New HDD Tech To enable 100TB HDDs Tom’s Hardware US. August 10, 2010. Retrieved form http://www.tomshardware.com/news/hdd-ssd-harddrive,11048.html