For local storage, we get what we want

I hear many complaints about IT equipment, but I have heard few complaints about the cost of storage (that is, disk drives). It wasn't always this way.

In the early microcomputer era, storage was cassette tape. If you were wealthy, storage was floppy disk. Floppy disk systems (and media) were not cheap. They cost both money and time; once you had the hardware you needed to write the software to use them. (CP/M fixed some of that.)

The early hard drives were large, hulking beasts that required special power supplies, dedicated cabinets, and extra care. My first hard drive was a 10 Megabyte disc that was the size of an eight inch floppy drive (or an old-style, paper edition of Webster's Dictionary). The cabinet (which contained the hard drive, an actual eight-inch floppy drive, and power supply) was the size of a microwave oven and weighed more than fifty pounds. The retail price was $5000 -- in 1979 dollars, more than an automobile.

Beyond the money, the time necessary to configure such a drive was non-trivial. Operating systems at the time could access at most 8 Megabytes. You could not use the entire hard drive at one time. Hard drives of 10 Megabytes were partitioned into smaller volumes with special software. These partitioning operations also took time.

People who had hard drives really wanted them. People who didn't have them complained about the cost. People who did have them complained about the time to configure them.

Over time, hard disks became smaller in physical size and required less power. Today, the "standard" hard drive is either a 3.5-inch or 2.5-inch drive that holds a Terabyte and costs less than $200 (in 2013 dollars). Adding such a drive to your existing PC is easy: plug it in and the operating system detects it automatically. Operating systems can address most commonly available hard drives; partitioning is no longer necessary. The "cost" of a hard drive, in terms of money and time, is trivial compared to the prices of that earlier age.

Which leads to a question: If we were, earlier, willing to spend time and money (lots of time and lots of money) on a hard drive, why are we unwilling to spend that time and money now? We could, after all, create disk arrays with huge amounts of storage (petabytes) by ganging together multiple hard drives into a cabinet. Fifty pounds of hard drives, power supply, and interface electronics could store lots and lots of data.

But we don't. We accept the market solution of 2 Terabyte drives and live with that.

The market for the early hard drives was the tinkerers and hackers. These were the folks who enjoyed configuring systems and re-writing operating systems. Today, those are a small percentage of the PC market. Current plug-compatible hard drives of 2 Terabytes or less are, for most people, good enough. These two factors tell me that capacity is good, but convenience is better.

We live with what the market offers (except for a few ornery hackers). We live with the trade-off between cost and convenience. I think we recognize that trade-off. I think we understand that we are living with certain choices.

And I think that we don't complain, because we understand that we have made that choice.