I can’t understand why I sometimes dither about which mass storage device to buy. The answer is really obvious: Buy the storage with the highest capacity. It’s cheaper. That philosophy may not make sense, but that’s only because you fear the math.
To get the most for your storage dollar, always calculate the dollars per byte of storage. Or, these days, that would be dollars per gigabyte (GB) of storage. Try to avoid human instinct, which is to pay less so that you save some money. Trust me, with computer storage that philosophy doesn’t work.
While ruminating on this topic, my mind went back to the 1990s. Back then, I would routinely write books on buying computers — which was a big, scary topic for most folks.
In the books, I would drive home the concept of how much storage really costs. To prove it, I provided a graph, such as the one you see in Figure 1, stolen from Buying a Computer For Dummies:
Figure 1. The average code of 100MB of hard drive storage, 1998.
In 1984, you would spend $10,000 per 100MB of storage. By 1998 (when the book was written), that storage costs $7 per 100MB.
Today, 100MB of hard drive storage costs about 6/10th of a cent.
But it can be cheaper!
For my math, I used the first 1TB hard drive that showed up on Amazon. It costs $65.63.
That’s $65.63 per 1TB or
$6.56 per 100GB or
$0.66 per 10GB or
$0.06 per 1GB or
$0.006 per 100MB.
But a 3TB hard drive advertised on the same page sells for $119.99.
That’s $39.99 per 1TB, which would factor down to about 4/10th of a cent for 100MB.
So which is cheaper?
Obviously, the 1TB drive at $65.63, right?
WRONG.
The $119.99 drive is far cheaper. For (I’m rounding) $120 you get 3TB of storage which is $40/TB. The $65.63 drive may look cheaper, but it’s giving you 1TB of storage for $65. That’s a 62 percent premium over buying the higher-capacity drive.
The same logic applies to media cards and thumb drives: When you calculate the dollars-per-gigabyte amount, you discover that the higher capacity storage device is far cheaper.
Don’t worry about not using all that storage! You’ll find stuff to put there. Trust me, I think I properly guess hard drive storage all the time, but I’m wrong. I could always use more storage. And I don’t want to pay a premium for buying less.
