science & techanalysisOur World in Data1950s–2020s
Computer storage has become millions of times cheaper since IBM's first hard drive in 1956
The cost of storing digital information has fallen by a factor of many millions since 1956, when IBM shipped the RAMAC, an early commercial hard disk drive that held only a few megabytes across dozens of large spinning platters. Storage then cost thousands of dollars per megabyte. Prices have dropped roughly exponentially since, a pattern tracked in data compiled by the computer scientist John C. McCallum. Each era brought denser magnetic recording on disks and later flash memory, which packed more bits into the same physical space. That steady fall is why photos, music and video now fill phones at almost no marginal cost.
Hard drives store data as tiny magnetic regions on spinning disks, and packing more of them into the same area lowers the cost per bit. Flash memory later stores charge in transistors, and shrinking those transistors and stacking layers vertically has kept the trend going.
Falling storage costs changed what people and businesses keep: whole archives, sensor data and the enormous datasets used to train AI are now stored routinely because it is cheap. It is one of the clearest examples of a technology's price falling faster than almost any other good.
