A 50-year, non-scientific retail history of what it costs to store one gigabyte of data.
(Timeline: 1977 · 1982 · 1996 · 2010 · 2026)
In October 1982, I started my first job in technology — selling boxes of Elephant Brand DS/DD 5.25" diskettes at The Software Store on Fowler Ave in Tampa, FL. A 10-pack ran $19.95. Each disk held 360KB. Do the math and that's $5,541.67 per gigabyte.
Since the mid-2000s, I've done a completely non-scientific retail search each fall — Amazon, Google, whatever's on the shelf — to see what a gigabyte costs. This page is the running record.
For years, this was a scrappy one-page spreadsheet screenshot. This year, with AI-assisted research pulling from old catalogs, price-history tools, and archived ads, the dataset got a real upgrade: 221 individual price records across 87 different storage media formats, spanning 49 distinct years reaching back to 1977.
Prices are retail snapshots from a non-scientific search each fall. Full sourcing and the complete year-by-year dataset back to 1977 are public on GitHub: github.com/askmcconnell/costofagig
For the first time in this dataset's history, storage got more expensive almost across the board.
Of the 19 items priced so far this year: 13 rose year-over-year (most by 60% to nearly 300%); 2 dropped (32TB bare HDD down 40%, 8TB CineMag down 35%); and 3 held flat.
The bookend stat: the 1977 Radio Shack C-60 cassette tape—like I used for data storage on my first computer, a Commodore PET—cost $9,034/GB. The same cassette, bought on Amazon today, costs $32,073.86/GB — up 255% from where this tradition started.
This year fills a long-standing gap: rewritable optical media hadn't been tracked here since 2018. Three Verbatim formats — CD-RW, DVD+RW, and BD-R — now have their own multi-year Keepa price histories. Two more legacy formats join them: Iomega Jaz and Zip disks, long discontinued but still sold as new-old-stock on Amazon.
Log-scale chart of the cheapest available storage each year, plotted against formats that never really got cheaper and are tracked as fixed reference lines: the DS/DD floppy (1982 baseline), the C-60 cassette (1977 bookend), and the three rewritable optical formats (CD-RW, DVD+RW, BD-R).
| Format | Units for 1GB | Stack height |
|---|---|---|
| C-60 Cassette (1977) | 5,682 | ~237 feet |
| DS/DD Floppy (1982) | 2,777 | ~30 feet |
| microSD (2025+) | 1 | Size of a fingernail |
| Media | $/GB | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| 32TB Bare HDD (Seagate) | $0.0362 | −40% |
| 30TB Portable HDD (Glyph) | $0.0666 | +163% |
| BD-R 50GB (Verbatim) | $0.08 | +9% |
| 1TB Thumb Drive (Generic) | $0.10 | +61% |
| 1TB Thumb Drive (Name) | $0.15 | +97% |
| DVD+RW (Verbatim) | $0.1651 | +20% |
| 2TB microSD (Lexar) | $0.1766 | +108% |
| 512GB microSD | $0.2324 | +297% |
| 2TB SD Card (SanDisk) | $0.275 | new |
| 30TB Portable SSD (Glyph) | $0.36 | +140% |
| CFExpress Type B 4TB | $0.3985 | +77% |
| 122.88TB SSD (Samsung) | $0.4639 | +277% |
| CD-RW 700MB (Verbatim) | $1.8557 | 0% |
| 8TB CineMag 5e | $4.0017 | −35% |
| Iomega Zip 750MB | $13.3289 | 0% |
| Iomega Jaz 1GB | $24.99 | +4% |
| Iomega Zip 250MB | $42.305 | +21% |
| DS/DD Floppy | $6,928.61 | −0.03% |
| C-60 Cassette (Qty 2) | $32,073.86 | +33% |
| Media | Year | 1 GB Size | Scale |
|---|---|---|---|
| C-60 Cassette | 1977 | 72,238 mm (237 ft) | ~20-story building |
| DS/DD Floppy | 1982 | 9,144 mm (30 ft) | ~3-story building |
| microSD | 2025 | 0.0005 mm | wavelength of light |
| Enterprise SSD | 2026 | 0.0000586 mm | roughly virus-sized |
Same gigabyte, same unit, 49 years apart: 1.23 billion times smaller.
| Media/Year | Interface | Speed | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| C-60 Cassette (1977) | Tape | 50 bytes/sec | ~231 days |
| DS/DD Floppy (1982) | MFM | 31.25 KB/s | ~8 hr 53 min |
| SCSI-1 (1986) | Parallel SCSI | 5 MB/s | ~3 min 20 sec |
| USB 2.0 (2000) | USB | ~35 MB/s | ~28.6 sec |
| SATA I (2003) | Serial ATA | 150 MB/s | ~6.7 sec |
| CFExpress (2026) | PCIe 3.0 | ~1,700 MB/s | ~0.59 sec |
| Portable SSD (2026) | Thunderbolt 3 | ~2,800 MB/s | ~0.36 sec |
| Enterprise SSD (2026) | PCIe 5.0 | 7,500 MB/s | ~0.13 sec |
From 1977 cassette to 2026 enterprise SSD: 150 million times faster — a 231-day transfer collapsed into 0.13 seconds.
But wait—there's more. That 231-day cassette time doesn't account for the human cost of physical media manipulation. To store 1GB on C-60 cassettes, you'd need to:
Open cassette case → Remove cassette → Insert into recorder → Close door → Record → Open door → Remove cassette → Peel off label → Write label → Re-insert into case.
Repeat 5,682 times.
Estimate ~45 seconds per cassette (accounting for label writing). That's 71 hours of wrist-destroying, repetitive labor — or about 9 full workdays of non-stop cassette swapping before your fingers start asking why you didn't just buy a microSD card.
Add the 231 days of actual transfer time, and storing 1GB on 1977 cassettes = 231 days + 71 hours of human pain. Your wrist didn't stand a chance.
IBM 350 RAMAC (1956) — 3.75MB, ~2,000 lbs, being restored at the Computer History Museum.
Photo: vnunet.com, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.
A 2026-era 2TB microSD card — 533,000× the RAMAC's capacity, weighing about a quarter of a gram.
Photo: Bautsch, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The IBM 350 RAMAC (1956): 3.75MB, weighed 1,730–2,200 lbs, about the size of two refrigerators. A 2026 2TB microSD card holds 533,333× more data and weighs 3.6 million times less.
Sam Watson and Don Watson gave me my first job in technology at The Software Store in Tampa in 1982. Thanks also to Keepa, the magazine and catalog archive sites, and the Anthropic Claude team for the research and page-building work behind this year's edition.