The Cost of HD Storage
Last year, when I was looking around for a good buy on a large external HD, I was amazed by how cheap external HD storage works out to be. When I calculated the cost per GB, the best price I found was 24 cents per GB. I haven’t bought a floppy disc in a very long time, but I priced a box of 1.44 mb floppies, and they worked out to about 29 cents a disc, or 20.139 cents per MB!
If you bought the equivalent of a 500 GB drive in floppies, you would need 355,555 discs, and it would cost you $103,111 ! ….. Plus shipping! Plus storage! … and a pallet jack!
(A GB is 1024 MB; a floppy is 1.44 MB. That’s about 711 floppies per GB, or about $206 worth of floppies per GB. Compare that to your $20 1 GB pen drive! )
With an 8 foot ceiling, I calculate it would take a storage closet about 6 x 7 feet to hold all 355,555 discs if you threw away all the packaging material.
(A stack of 10 floppies with labels attached is about 16.13 cubic inches. There are 1728 cubic inches in a cubic foot.)
Someone should check my math. 