a myriad of choices available within that price bracket. Over the years, storage has considerably advanced in terms of both capacity and read-write speeds, and it has become much more affordable as well. Nowadays, you can discover an ultra-compact drive option that connects directly to your smartphone for photo backups. This wasn’t always true. In the early 1980s, at a time when computers were just emerging, hard drives were not only exceedingly costly but also had a restricted storage capacity. The first hard drive from Apple, named the ProFile, came out in 1981 and could hold a mere five megabytes of data, priced at $3,499.
Doing the calculations, that equates to roughly $700,000 for each gigabyte of storage at that time. What’s even more shocking, though, is that the drive could hardly accommodate a single average smartphone photo taken today. An HD photo at two megapixels, with a resolution of 1920 by 1080, would be around two megabytes in size — many smartphones capture images at a much higher resolution, indicating that Apple’s drive would manage just two images, if that.
Storage advancements have primarily been influenced by a concept known as Kryder’s Law, which bears similarities to Moore’s Law, a principle you might be familiar with. In contrast, Moore’s Law posits that processing and memory capabilities double due to enhancements in semiconductors or transistors on each chip every eighteen months. Kryder’s Law pertains to the exponentially larger and faster evolution of storage capacities, with disk density doubling every 13 months. Since around 2012, Kryder’s Law is said to have somewhat decelerated, but when compared to the initial expenses and