In November 2006 we did a quick overview on prices of different alternatives for data storage. For the prices we used products that are most popular in their category (these are generally the low-cost end bulk products) sold by a major Finnish retailer.
The traditional tape storage offered the cheapest alternative for storing data. Tape is not often an alternative for home users but is used here as comparison because it’s significantly lower price.
Single layer DVD without covers is slightly cheaper alternative than the most sold SATA hard disk. The advantage of DVD for storing data over long time also that you have to pay for electricity only when the data is used. The good side of hard disk is that it is always on and the overhead using storage is minimal.
The new BlueRay technology with 25 GB disks offers storage for price slightly lower than recordable CDs. We expect the price of the BlueRay storage media to come down as soon as we see them rolling out to stores on wide scale. Then the use of larger disks may offer nicer way to operate with large data than frequent changing of small CDs.
Finally we included to our comparison a web hotel offering 5GB of managed storage for 5 euros in a month. With web hotel the significant advantage comes in the fact that the storage is accessible from anywhere, and you can easily access the data even in your mobile devices. The web hotel service provider pays also for the electricity and you are allowed to make 100 GB of traffic for the monthly fee. As people start to be more used paying for services this becomes an appealing alternative.
*The price of copyright protection is included above: 20 cents per CD and 60 cents per DVD
A very cheap online storatge is now in it’s beta phase. You may have 50 GigaBytes of storage for free trial period of three months. After that, the service is said to be priced as low as 5 euros per month. Unfortunately, the service is in Finnish only
http://isog.pp.fi