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Matt Komorowski
Personal blog · mkomo.comdatasystems
Matt Komorowski writes matt komorowski, a personal blog at mkomo.com about data and systems. Since 2013, 16 different Hacker News readers have linked it 17 times, most often “A history of storage cost”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
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17mentions?
16HN people?
2013–2024first – last linked?
Too few sampled comments (16) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers cite Matt Komorowski's cost-per-gigabyte charts, which track hard drive, SSD and RAM prices per GB over decades, as a data source in storage cost discussions.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 16 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The intersection of Matt Komorowski and the Internet
Most-linked posts?
- A history of storage cost8 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2013-02-20
- /cost-per-gigabyte-update5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2015-08-02
- /cost-per-gigabyte-update2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-03-27
What Hacker News says?
Thank you for your comments. However, Migadu is not intended to be "cheap". That is not the selling point of it. We used to use Google Apps for multiple domains for our starup projects, ideas etc. Switching between these multiple accounts was becoming ridiculous and complex. Then, they made it $5 per account. We actually had many addresses but only two users. Our total cost of that would be measured in hundreds of $…
Comment linking /cost-per-gigabyte-update
on “Show HN: World class unlimited email hosting for all your domains from $4/month”Submitted A history of storage cost as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIt wasn't a VCR with a hard drive, VCR's for the most part used an analogue format unless you had some of the few digital ones that were super expensive and used for productions. In 1999 making a cost effective DVR couldn't have been that easy, the hardware was pretty puny and storage was expensive. A ~16 GB hard drive alone in 1999 would cost 250-350$ [0] A TV tuner card capable of MPEG-2 encoding on chip would cos…
Comment linking /cost-per-gigabyte
on “Ranking TV Shows That Got Canceled”Backblaze posts some good stuff on HD pricing and reliability. Here's a good chart from their data: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/ They also link to this great (logarithmic) chart: http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte-update TL;DR: price hasn't been dropping by half annually, but prices have come down from ~$0.70/GB to < $0.03/GB now. So roughly a factor of 20 over 13-14 years, somewh…
Comment linking /cost-per-gigabyte-update
on “ZFS 128 bit storage: Are you high? (2004)”500KB/page at $0.02/page = $20.97/GB. HDD is $0.01-0.03/GB, SSD is $0.10-0.25/GB, BD/DVD are $0.02-0.10/GB, respectively, at retail prices and before counting redundancy. $20/GB was as far back for HDD as Oct 1999, which by the way fell further to around $7.50 next year in Oct 2000[1]. Yeah interesting but 10-100 fold density improvement would be nice... 1: https://mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte
Comment linking /cost-per-gigabyte
on “New campaign targeting security researchers”I would be interested in seeing the log of the prices on the vertical axis. The curve seems to fit the exponential decline in prices that I expect to see. I think the difference in regimes would be more clear cut that way. Just picking the end points and the middle, I see: (11 cents, 2009), (5 cents, 2013), (2.8 cents, 2017). So it went from slightly more than halving in cost in the first 4 years (55% reduction) to…
Comment linking /cost-per-gigabyte
on “Hard Drive Cost per Gigabyte”http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte-update
Comment linking /cost-per-gigabyte-update
on “How big is the Google Earth database?”Admittedly, it would have been a lot of drives. Back in circa 2000, according to http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte , 20 Gigabyte Drives were in vogue @$200/pop. So, a Terabyte would have been 50 drives, 10 Terabytes @500 Drives. 10s of terabytes at a minimum 1000 drives. I'm beginning to question how "simple" an operation this might have been after all....
Comment linking /cost-per-gigabyte
on “Google's fiber leeching caper”In the year 2000 storage cost about $12/GB [1]. This article claims 10s of TB, so let's say 20 TB, which is the most conservative possible estimate. 20 TB = 20000 GB. At $12/GB, that comes out to $240,000. That doesn't include retransmission cost (for busted drives) or shipping. I'm not sure the analysis is correct here. Presumably their minimum commit was a lot lower than $240k, because otherwise they wouldn't have…
Comment linking /cost-per-gigabyte
on “Google's fiber leeching caper”Everybody who pays @95th dreams of doing something like this the very first time that 95th billing is explained to them. I mean Everbody . What the Article fails to explain, is that there is both a port cost, and a minimum commit. For much less than what it would have cost them for the port, and minimum commit on a 1 Gig connection, they could have simply mailed their data via USPS and had it there in three days. Al…
Comment linking /cost-per-gigabyte
on “Google's fiber leeching caper”The price of disk has dropped at nearly the same pace as ram. As has the cost of compute. At the same time data growth has increased faster than either has dropped... so I'm not really sure the price argument holds water. If I can buy ram at 1/100th the cost but I need to store 500x more data... that isn't a net win on cost. From ~$1000.00/gb to $0.03/gb http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte-update
Comment linking /cost-per-gigabyte-update
on “RAM Is the New Disk”> In '95 consumer grade computers were shipping with between 512MB and 1GB. Do you have a source for that? I bought a consumer grade computer in 1995 and it only had 120MB of disk space. And the historical prices suggest that 250MB was beyond consumer prices until ~1995. http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte suggests 250MB would have been >$500 until 1994. Which is nowhere near "consumer" price.
Comment linking /cost-per-gigabyte
on “Samsung crams 30TB of SSD into a single 2.5-inch drive”I think the the "100% Go" stuff is appealing in that you just have one file that works across OSes, with minimal screwing around. For things that become part of the OS, yes, I'd rather they come via some install approach that includes the necessary integration. But for anything else, I think a lot of our packaging approaches are dedicated to saving disk space and RAM, which is something that matters way less to me n…
Comment linking /cost-per-gigabyte-update
on “Serve2d – A protocol detecting server”https://jcmit.net/diskprice.htm chronological list, there is also https://mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte-update
Comment linking /cost-per-gigabyte-update
on “What you can learn from old hard drive adverts”As a very rough ballpark, hard drive cost was around $1/GB, putting a single copy of everything around a half million dollars. Honestly quite a bit less then I expected for back then. Of course there are tons of other costs, but still not unreasonable for a Walmart size company. http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte
Comment linking /cost-per-gigabyte
on “What Wal-Mart Knows About Customers' Habits (2004)”Looking at this chart[0], my guess would be around 1997. [0] https://mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte-update
Comment linking /cost-per-gigabyte-update
on “My dad and I replaced a 100MB HDD with a 1GB HDD for $100. When did this happen?”http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte
Comment linking /cost-per-gigabyte
on “Tracking Assets in the Production of “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within” (2002)”
