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As a follow up to the storage prices I just posted, here are some interesting history. Ivan Smith has collected a long list of prices, going as far back as 1956, and including every major disk since then. While at Wikipedia, there’s an interesting article about general history of hard disks. Finally, Techxilla has some old and funny ads.
About two and half years ago, I collected the prices of various storage media, and calculated the cost per GB. Since then, there have been big movements, and as expected the storage continue to get cheaper and cheaper. With the 2 GB disks, the price is 4 Euro cents per GB.
Optical storage also gets cheaper, and in recent years bigger spindles of Blu-ray disk have been made available. They are still beaten by DVD-R, however the margin is no longer significant. Two years ago, it was three times more expensive to store on Blu-ray than DVD-R. Also interesting is the DVD DL 8.5 GB prices. They are now almost as expensive to use as DVD 4.7 GB. That might be interesting for backing up bigger files.
New to the list is the Solid State Disks. At 40x Euros / GB, they are still very expensive compared to spinning disks, but given some time, maybe it might drop. However, looking at the professional CF Cards, it does not look promising for solid state. Although the get faster and bigger, high end Sandisk CF cards have not move significantly in terms Euro / GB. Of course, there are slower chips which are cheaper, but you might not want that technology in your SSD.
| Media Type | Product | Capacity | Price CHF | Price Euros | Euros / GB | GBs / Euro |
| Harddisk | Western Digital Caviar Green 1.5TB | 1500 GB | 89.00 | 66.41 | 0.04 | 22.59 |
| Harddisk | Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB | 2000 GB | 119.00 | 88.80 | 0.04 | 22.52 |
| Harddisk | Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB | 1000 GB | 73.00 | 54.47 | 0.05 | 18.36 |
| Harddisk | Western Digital Caviar GP 1TB | 1000 GB | 99.00 | 73.87 | 0.07 | 13.54 |
| Harddisk | Western Digital Caviar GP 750GB | 750 GB | 91.00 | 67.90 | 0.09 | 11.05 |
| Harddisk | Western Digital Caviar GP 500GB | 500 GB | 73.00 | 54.47 | 0.11 | 9.18 |
| DVD-R | Verbatim 16x DVD-R 100 @ 4,7GB | 470 GB | 100.00 | 74.62 | 0.16 | 6.30 |
| Blu-ray | Verbatim BD-R SL 25 @ 50GB | 1250 GB | 280.00 | 208.93 | 0.17 | 5.98 |
| Blu-ray | Verbatim BD-R 25 @ 25GB | 625 GB | 146.00 | 108.94 | 0.17 | 5.74 |
| DVD+R DL | Verbatim 8x DVD+R DL 25 @ 8,5GB | 213 GB | 55.00 | 41.04 | 0.19 | 5.18 |
| CD-R | Verbatim CD-R 100 @ 700MB | 70 GB | 31.00 | 23.13 | 0.33 | 3.03 |
| SSD | Corsair P256 SSD MLC, 256GB | 256 GB | 558.00 | 416.38 | 1.63 | 0.61 |
| SSD | Intel X25-M G2 160GB | 160 GB | 449.00 | 335.04 | 2.09 | 0.48 |
| Compact Flash | Sandisk CF Card 32GB Extreme | 32 GB | 215.00 | 160.43 | 5.01 | 0.20 |
| Compact Flash | Sandisk CF Card 16GB Extreme | 16 GB | 119.00 | 88.80 | 5.55 | 0.18 |
| Compact Flash | Sandisk CF Card 64GB Extreme Pro | 64 GB | 665.00 | 496.22 | 7.75 | 0.13 |
| Compact Flash | Sandisk CF Card 4GB Extreme III | 4 GB | 70.00 | 52.23 | 13.06 | 0.08 |
Exchange rate: 1 CHF = 1.340136 Euros.
I got some questions about how to put together the automatic watering system I posted about yesterday. Here are the links to similar products on Amazon. I could not find the exact same product, however they should do the job just fine.
It turns out there are very many different “water computers”. The simplest I could find is the “Gardena 1860 Classic 3-Cycle Water Timer T 1030 Plus – $83“.
Then there is the drip systems. These includes a thin supply pipe of 5 meters (which you will cut to fit your needs), the drip heads (usually 15-20 pieces) , and small plastic pegs to stick into the soil in the flower pots. There are very many boxes for this as well, and some of them even claim to include the watering computer. On Amazon, the product description says all of them do, however, I suspect that is a copy/paste mistake, and that only the most expensive of them (USD ~100) includes a computer as mentioned above. At least that would match the pictures on the boxes.
Gardena 1399 Micro-Drip Multiple Application Drip Irrigation Starter Set – $40
Gardena 1402 Micro-Drip Starter Set For Flower Boxes – $40
(I think this might be the one I got).
Gardena 1398 Micro-Drip Watering Starter Kit With Timer – $100
Looking at the picture and the price, this is mostly likely the only kit which actually includes the watering timer / computer as well.
Gardena 1403 Micro-Drip Starter Set For Greenhouses – $90
If your system is outside, there should be no problem plugging this into your garden water supply, and you’re done. However, if you set it up inside, you want to limit the amount potential water spill. So you’ll need a water container of some sort. 10 liters should be fine, and make sure it has a tap as shown in the picture below. Also, make sure the nozzle on the tap is long enough, so that you can attach it to a hose or quick connector.
Finally, to connect it all together, I used a garden hose between the water container and the computer, as seen in this picture. I needed three of the orange hose quick connectors: One for each end of the hose, and one (in my case the larger version) for the water container nozzle.
And very finally, to connect the hose to the water container, which now had two orange “female” quick connectors, I needed a male-male piece. I cannot find the exact product right now, but it was something similar to the picture below, but in grey.
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