capcloud

I was pondering to myself whether there is an equivalent to Moore’s law for storage. Moore’s law states that processing power doubles every two years.

So I whipped out my calculator and did some calculating. I thought (until I just looked it up) that the doubling period for Moore’s law was 18 months. So. My first PC had a 40MB hard drive. This was 18 years ago, which (based on 18 months) means 12 doublings.

Which is 40 × 2^12, which comes to 163840. Dividing this by 1024 gives us 160GB. Guess what size the hard disk in my current PC is? Yup, 160GB.

But a reasonably-priced hard drive these days is 500GB. So if there is a Moore’s law for storage, the doubling period is even less than for processing power. It comes out at a little less than 18 months.

Interesting.