[pbw]

A modern HDD is 15-30 million times cheaper per byte than that 10mb “hard disk you’ve been waiting for” ad according to diskprices.com. What will get 30 million times better in the future vs. what is tapped out?

‪If you adjust for inflation assuming the year was 1980, the drive would cost $12,000 in today’s dollars. So today’s drives are over 800 million times cheaper. Plus lighter and way faster I’m sure. So more than 1B times better, easily, with 42 years of progress. ‬

[masswerk]

Now you could argue that there’s less space on a modern drive, given how file sizes increased. Even 5MB was massive then, with mostly text files.

I still recall when I had to upgrade from MS Word 4.x/Mac, which did still fit on a single floppy (together with a basic OS), to MS Word 5.x/Mac, which was more then 5MB, on an MPB 100 with a 20MB disk: I had to dump half of the installed applications most of the data in order for Word to fit. Soon, HDs increased to 10 times the size to keep up with this, but soon enough, 220MB was less than that 20MB had been before. Same with GB-drives, and so on. If you want to transpile a simple text file of a few lines into another simple text file, you may need an entire drive for dependencies…

To my own observations, drive sizes always stayed about the same in relation to what you could put onto them. But, at the same time, requirements for temporary storage are steadily increasing, which may provide you with even less usable space.

As for price, yes, economies of scale. If you’re selling billions and billions of drives, you may do things that were unthinkable, when the total number of sales was still in the 100Ks, at a fraction of the cost.

[pbw]

You are right the more space we have the more we dream up ways to use it. However I wouldn't go as far to say "drive sizes always stayed about the same in relation to what you could put onto them". People still store text but it's now basically free. Images and audio are heading towards free. Videos still add up. You specifically call out executable programs which I agree have grown in size very rapidly. So I think it depends on what you are putting on the drive. I wouldn't say all space gains have been eaten up by bigger files.