Cheap, cheap memory

I see that Kogan is selling a 128GB USB drive for just $79 at the moment.

Which got me to check some of the memory prices I’ve recorded in times past. For example, back in July 2010 the cheapest (on a per megabyte basis) memory I could find was 4GB USB stick costing $12.00. At that price the Kogan stick would be $400.

In July 2007 memory was an order of magnitude more expensive. The cheapest per MB was a 4GB SD card at $90. The Kogan 128GB card at those prices would have been $2,800.

Now let’s go right back another five years, to October 2002. Back then the cheapest memory I could find was in Compact Flash form, with a 256MB card costing $277. Ouch!

At that cost per megabyte this Kogan card would not cost $79

, but $135,000. You could buy four of them or one house.

Update: Thanks to Russ Roberts at Cafe Hayek for linking to this post. Great reading there, and lots of cool economic and tech stuff at Econtalk.