In early 2002, I recall a conversation with my friend Alden Hart, now CTO of The Adrenaline Group, about what he referred to as the “personal terabyte”.  We wondered when the price of disk would be cheap enough that home users would have a TB of disk in their homes.  Well, we’re clearly there. 

I just installed the HP MediaSmart Server EX470, the 500 GB unit.  I immediately added a 1 TB Western Digital drive, bringing the unit’s capacity to 1.5 TB thereabouts (the server actually shows 1.3 GB).  The total price of the unit was about $800.  And I have 2 open bays for another couple of terabytes should I need them.

Excluding the server for the moment, I paid $260 for the 1TB drive, which means that we’re into the $0.26/GB range, something that Alden and I only imagined 6 years ago.  Storage has become dirt cheap over the years and the fact that HP and Microsoft are pitching 1/2 to 1 TB units to home users is an amazing step in a very short amount of time. 

Alden, we haven’t chatted in a long time — but here’s to ya.