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.