Seventy Years of $/TB

McCallum's dataset (via Our World in Data) 1956–2022, then a monthly street-price layer 2023→now parsed from Wayback snapshots of diskprices.com. Log price, twelve orders of magnitude. The kink at far right is the first sustained upward bend in the dataset's seventy years — AI demand outbidding civilians on every tier at once. DRAM is the violent one: ~5× since mid-2025. LTO never moved. Hit FAMINE for the monthly zoom.

The hierarchy, priced — every latency & durability tier

Aug 2026 frontier in (access latency, $/TB) space. Hollow = volatile, filled = persistent, ringed = archival. The staircase is the live Pareto frontier; Optane haunts it as the tier the market executed. Glacier priced per TB-year — service, not media.

Sources: pre-2023 = jcmit.net/McCallum via OWID (lowest recorded price — chip/spot methodology). 2023+ = monthly street layer: 16 Wayback snapshots of diskprices.com parsed per tier (cheapest new listing; HDD ≥12TB CMR, NAND = NVMe 1–4TB, LTO-9 native), DRAM = 64GB DDR5 kit street ÷ 0.064 anchored to Tom's/tracker prints; cross-checked against TrendForce contract moves (NAND +55–60% QoQ Q1'26, DRAM +90–95% Q1'26). The level step at the 2023 seam on DRAM/NAND is methodology (spot chip → retail street), not market. Dashed = interpolated between snapshots. Known artifact: 2024's $8.3/TB HDD floor = single-seller 12TB EOL stock; second-cheapest ran ~$13.4. LTO flat ~$5/TB through the entire famine — independent supply chain, the counterpoint tier. All log scales unless LINEAR selected.