This is what a 5MB hard drive cost in the 1980s

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Even with component shortages raging in 2026, you can buy a terabyte solid-state drive for less than $200, and that’s no coincidence: there are a ton of options in this price range. Storage has become much more capable over the years, in terms of capacity and read-write speeds, and also much cheaper. Now you can find an ultra-compact drive solution that plugs directly into your smartphone to back up photos. This was not always the case. In the early 1980s, when computers were still in their infancy, hard drives were not only ridiculously expensive, but they also had limited storage capacity. Apple’s first hard drive, called ProFile, was released in 1981 and held just five megabytes of data for a price of $3,499.

If you do the math, then that was about $700,000 per gigabyte of storage. What’s most alarming, however, is that the disk would barely contain the average photo from today’s smartphone. A two-megapixel HD photo, with a resolution of 1,920 x 1,080, would be around two megabytes in size – most phones take photos at a significantly higher resolution, meaning Apple’s drive would hold two photos, if that.

Storage has largely been governed by something called Kryder’s Law, which is reminiscent of Moore’s Law, a principle you may already be familiar with. In comparison, Moore’s Law states that processing and memory power doubles every eighteen months due to improvements in semiconductors or transistors per chip. Kryder’s Law addresses exponential and faster growth in storage capacity, with disk density doubling every 13 months. Kryder’s Law has reportedly slowed down since around 2012, but compared to the original costs and storage capacities, that matters little.

Even though the size of SSDs of various formats has decreased significantly, including small drives with flash storage, they still have their limitations. This is why you can’t just buy a petabyte hard drive and may not be able to for a while. To increase the capacity of physical disks, manufacturers must increase the platter size or the number of platters in an enclosure. The larger the platter or drive, the more heat generated and the larger the overall size of the device. The same goes for adding multiple hard drives to a single system to increase capacity, such as in a server rack. They can’t keep making hard drives bigger and bigger physically, and that has slowed progress. Conversely, reducing the size of trays to allow more to be stacked without increasing physical size or overheating runs into the diminishing returns of Kryder’s Law.

This is not to say that nothing is happening behind the scenes or that there are no innovations. For large data centers, and especially AI data centers, more storage will be needed. Companies like Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital – today’s only hard drive manufacturers – are working to find bigger and better solutions. Energy-assisted magnetic recording (EAMR) technologies are one of the priorities, with each company adopting their own methods to achieve larger disk capacities. Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), for example, will be used by Toshiba and Western Digital, with platters made of glass and material alloys like iron-platinum (FePt). Seagate achieved a capacity of 6.9 terabytes per platter in a research setting with HAMR. According to estimates, 100 terabyte disks will be made between 2030 and 2031 if everything stays on track.

Although using cloud storage may seem somewhat magical, storing your photos, videos and files online and allowing accessibility from any device, its basis remains the physical infrastructure. Somewhere remote is a data center with servers, and within these servers are physical hard drives, where all this data is stored or backed up. When you use iCloud storage, for example, your data is backed up in Apple’s data centers, which may transfer some of their storage capacity to physical drives elsewhere. This is precisely why there are certain files that you should never upload to cloud storage.

But it also means that as cloud services and online platforms become bigger and more capable, so must the data centers that power them: They’ll need more storage and computing power to keep up. Demands for additional storage are driven by the overall market, which is why hard drives will likely continue to improve in capacity and capacity in the years to come. This is also why storage may become a problem for new phones, new devices and future computers: competition for storage chips, and therefore their prices, looks set to continue to grow.

The largest and most advanced drives will likely only be available to commercial and enterprise customers, which has always been the case. Prices may continue to rise as overall demand increases, but the good news for consumers is that today’s enterprise technology will likely become standard (or lower) fare for tomorrow’s everyday gadgets… just like that $3,500 Apple hard drive from 1981.