The first hard drive my father bought was 5mb. It connected to an Atari 800 through the Atari's 4 joystick ports. It's price was somewhere around $2000. That fact is utterly meaningless when comparing the price of HDs and SSDs (which are significantly more expensive than HDs) in the marketplace. Today.

That's probably cheap compared to all the monks you'd have to pay to write that down on parchment.

Cost is and always will be relative.

Especially when things move as fast as they do with memory and storage. Just 5 or 6 years ago I was buying a new 80gb SATA disk for just over CAD$100 (iirc). We've gone from around $1/gb then to almost exactly 10¢/gb. Probably cheaper for you guys south of the 49th.

edit: DirectCanada has disks cheaper than NCIX by almost 2¢/gb as well.

In comparison the average price for an SSD is CAD$375 for ~120gb, so let's call it $400 to make things easy, it's going to cost more with tax anyway. So it's around $3/gb or $3.50/gb which is 35x the cost.

However if you are building a new box and spending $1500+ anyway then an SSD is probably a very wise choice.

I remember when desktops cost $5,000 about 20 years ago.

Call me a young whippersnapper if you like, but I am not paying anywhere near $1000 for one now. Same idea with SSDs.

...how is this relevant to the fact that filling a server with SSDs is still much more expensive than with conventional HDs?

Because you can expect that cost to plummet substantially in a fairly short timeframe, based on past history. Bang for the buck on storage media improves by about an order of magnitude every 5 years.

5gb was just about enough 10 years. Different times, different size requirements. People do more with computers nowdays.