A flash drive example of surpassing Moore’s Law

In March 2003, I bought a Sony 128MB Micro vault flash drive for $107. That was $.83/MB.

Today, I bought a PNY 4GB Attaché flash drive for $25. That is $.00625/MB.

This won’t be an apples-to-apples comparison. My 2003 purchase was for the then-highest capacity available, whereas today’s purchase is not. And, the drives are from different manufacturers, and were bought from different stores. And, we could argue about constant dollars vs. inflation-adjusted dollars…

But.

That’s a 133x price improvement in 69 months. Or about a 225% storage improvement annually, compounded, per dollar.

Update: Thinking a bit more about this… That one purchase was for the maximum available capacity at the time, and the other was not, could hugely skew the math. I shouldn’t have cavalierly dismissed that aspect. And, different stores probably have different markups. So this post is all wet behind the ears. Don’t read it. Yes, you can buy more flash memory now for a constant amount of money than you could six years ago, but the P/P improvement might be nowhere near 133x.