Found a receipt. Noted for posterity. In 1993 I paid $1225 + tax for a one gigabyte hard drive.

1993

At the time I was launching my only mildly successful career with Steve Hayman And Associates (total number of associates: 0) visiting a financial client in downtown Toronto doing some consulting work for their system of NeXT computers, and it was convenient to carry a 1 gigabyte external SCSI hard drive back and forth. How else would you do it?

Geez. I thought I was living in the future. Look at all this data I’m carrying around! No, I can’t show it to you here on the subway, let’s not get carried away, I have to plug it in to power and attach it to a heavy nonportable computer.

2025

Today in 2025, 32 years later, what could I get for $1225? Hmm. 20 terabytes for $500, so maybe 50 terabytes?

That’s roughly 50,000 times cheaper. How many other things can fall in price by a factor of 50,000? Disk space must be basically FREE nowadays.

Of course my disks are all still 95% full, just like they were in 1993. Some things never change.

1956 - postscript

I know lots of people are itching to tell me about some super expensive hard drive they had before 1993. So how about this? Here is a 5 Megabyte hard drive being loaded on to a Pan Am jet in 1956.