$399.99 for a 3.1GB Hard Drive

September 20, 2011 by Gleb Budman // Leave a comment

No, not 3TB…3GB. We stumbled across this scan of a Best Buy news ad from 1996. “30-Message Pagers,” “Motorola Cellular Flip Phone,” “28.8 kbps modem”—what a trip down memory lane.

One of my favorite ads, for obvious reasons, is for hard drives:

At those prices, a Backblaze Storage Pod today would cost $18,000,000!
(45 drives x 3GB x 1000GB per TB x $400)

The roughly 220 Pods that we have at this point would cost nearly $4 billion!

I love the progress of technology.

About Gleb Budman

Gleb Budman is a co-founder and has served as our chief executive officer since 2007, guiding the business from its inception in a Palo Alto apartment to a company serving customers in more than 175 countries with over an exabyte of data under management. Gleb has served as a member of our board of directors since 2009 and as chairperson since January 2021.

Prior to Backblaze, Gleb was the senior director of product management at SonicWall and the vice president of products at MailFrontier, which was acquired by SonicWall. Before that, he served in a senior position at Kendara, which was acquired by Excite@Home, and previously founded and successfully exited two other startup companies.