I graduated high school in 1982. During that era I remember Radio Shack being the dominant source for all things computer. Their TRS-80 line of computers were perhaps not the sleekest but my school had a dozen of them – including their awkward cassette tape storage drives that constantly corrupted data (talk about SLOW data transfer!). Then one day Radio Shack’s computer store announced they had a 15-megabyte hard drive for the TRS 80 for only $2,495 plus $495 for the installation kit. Expensive but it let users kiss the days of cassette tape downloads goodbye! What would Mr. Tandy say about prices for today’s storage where an entire 1 TB drive is 1/5th the cost of his “installation kit”?
Fast forward to 2009 and while browsing Amazon this morning I noticed this Seagate FreeAgent Desk 1TB USB2.0 External Hard Drive for only $99.99. Is it just me or has the price of hard disk storage taken a drastic free fall? Last year we were seeing prices in the $200 range for 1 TB disks. Granted, for the $99 that Amazon charges you are getting a USB 2.0 drive (no firewire) but it’s good enough for most purposes – and it beats the heck out of cassette tape storage…
Seagate FreeAgent Desk 1TB – $99
