$229 for 32 GB. It was about 20 years ago I was excited with buying a 600 MB hard drive that cost about $500, not to mention that it was SCSI and not FireWire or USB

My earmark for comparison would be from about 10 years ago.

My first drive experience would have been with a 4gb external SCSI drive, that cost just north of $400. I got it to have a "portable" drive for my college classes; at the time that thing was a MASSIVE amount of storage compared to those puny 100mb Zip disks. Bear in mind that drive was roughly the volume of a laptop (and probably heavier), and I still had to lug around cables with it (let alone reboot any computer I connected it to).

My history with 3 keychain flash drives: 1st 256mb @ $180; 2nd 500mb @ $40; 3rd (and my favorite 'cause it's so frikkin' tiny) 1gb @ $12.

By comparison to my 4gb drive, that means you can have something that's hot swappable, doesn't require a power supply, has 8 times the amount of storage for 1/2 the cost of what I paid a decade ago. AND it fits in your pocket.

If such a thing existed while I was in school, it would have appeared to be no less than a miracle device to me (though I'm sure it would have cost about the same as a Hyundai). Even now... that is still an amazing little piece of technology.

Which does lend itself to pondering what we'll see in the next 10 years: I think we'll be at a point with storage miniaturization where it will be commonplace to have your files available to you at all times; whether they're stored on your cell phone or extracted off of a server on the 'net.

On a last note, I seriously doubt this is useable as a bootable drive: Isn't FireWire required to boot OS X?

27 years ago I worked for a government department that bought an IBM 4341 (group 2) with eight 550Mb disk drives, all the size of washing machines. And I wondered then how we were ever going to fill them up.

The 4Gb flash drive I bought six months ago was $NZ100. A month later it was $79; now it's $49.

Correction:

Quote

IBM wrote:
IBM 3370 direct access storage for both the 4331 and 4341 offers more than twice the recording density of previous IBM disk storage devices. It can store up to 571 million characters of information, operating at a data transfer rate of 1.859 million characters per second. It features a head manufactured by a semiconductor process. Up to 32 3370s can be attached to a storage control facility, which, in turn, can be channel-attached to the 4341 Processor.

Quote

xmattingly wrote:
On a last note, I seriously doubt this is useable as a bootable drive: Isn't FireWire required to boot OS X?

My first hard drive was a Conner, it was 5 Megabytes.
The 1st drive I worked with was attached a IBM 1620 computer.
15 megabytes.

I, too am stunned and amused at the price of a 32 gb solid state drive.

In 1988, I bought a 100 megabyte hard drive - paid $1000 for it. Everyone thought I was crazy - where would I get enough data to fill that up?

Two months ago, I bought a pair of 1 terabyte WD MyBook drives with FW800, paid less than $600 for the two of them. The price of those drives have dropped about $40 each. I suspect that by the middle of 2008, a bare 1 tb drive will be below $100.

Dreaming for a 32GB iPhone.