Historical hard disk drive prices?

April 13, 2008 5:40 PM

Are there any repositories of historical prices for hard drives?

Something that can tell me how the price (US $) of a 250 Gb IDE drive has changed in the last 2 years, or a 500 Gb IDE drive over the last year.

posted by jaimev to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Best answer: Price scan, for example this page has a graph at the bottom.
posted by about_time at 5:52 PM on April 13, 2008

If nothing else, you might be able to gather the data by going to the library and looking at ads in computer magazines from the past. They're typically archived for at least a few years, maybe longer on microfilm.
posted by tomwheeler at 6:41 PM on April 13, 2008

Here's a smattering of prices taken from Australian computer magazines, 2002-2007, including figures for RAM, HDD, Flash, and DVD storage.

This may not be exactly what you're looking for, but it tracks storage prices for non-volatile storage back as far as the 1960s. It's cool nonetheless.
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:10 PM on April 13, 2008

Best answer: Maybe use the Internet Archive's Way Back When Machine to find the prices from your favorite hard drive shop, using as many data points as you want?

E.g Using the Way Back Machine for geeks.com
- April 13th 2006 IDE Hard drive prices
- April 6th 2007 IDE prices from the same page
posted by inflatablekiwi at 7:20 PM on April 13, 2008

Computer Shopper Magazine back-issues go all the way back to the early 80s. Warning: old Computer Shopper magazines weigh something like 5 pounds each and have hundreds and hundreds of pages.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 8:15 PM on April 13, 2008