Storage Prices
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.