If there’s one constant in the IT industry it’s that storage will continue to get faster and cheaper. For a few years there’s been a steady progression of hard drive capacities through 500, 650 and 750GB but once they hit the 1TB barrier things seemed to accelerate, so we get to the point now where you can pre-order a 2TB drive.

So – as we enter 2009, what storage options are available and which configuration gives you the most bang for your buck? Is it finally time to dump that stack of 250GB drives in your aging PC and replace them with a shiny new 1TB?

I did just that recently and replaced a couple of older 300GB drives with a Western Digital 1TB which draws less power, is quieter, runs cooler and is faster than the ones I took out! It’s a relatively painless way of getting more performance out of an older PC.

Let’s look at a few options:

The smallest drive you can buy these days starts at 80GB, for about £32. On the other hand you can double that to 160GB for the same money so why bother? At the cheap end of the market there is no reason, but if you’re interested in speed smaller disks can be faster. The Western Digital VelociRaptor drives are generally regarded as some of the fastest SATA drives you can buy and they come in capacities of 150GB and 300GB.  You’ll pay handsomely for the privilege of owning them though; the 300GB model comes in at £200 which works out to be a hefty £0.66/GB.

In the more mainstream storage world there’s a fairly linear progression of price and capacity, from 500GB all the way up to 1.5TB:

• Seagate offers 500GB for £50 (£0.10/GB),
• WD’s new 640GB Caviar Black comes in at £62 (a shade under £0.10/GB)
• Samsungs 750GB Spinpoint F1 is £67 (£0.09/GB)
• A Seagate 1.5TB drive will set you back £110, a quite remarkable £0.07/GB.

You’ll still pay for performance – the WD “Black” series drives all come in at around £0.10/GB whatever capacity you choose – but if you just want storage it’s hard to argue with the value of 1.5TB for £110.

Lastly we come to Solid State Disks. SSD’s are the future, there’s no doubt of that. They use memory to store information rather than spinning metal disks and that makes them blindingly quick. The benefits are especially visible on laptops where the double impact of faster drives and better battery life (no moving parts = no motor to spin = less power) might offset the pain of an “early adopter” price tag.

If you have cash to spare, the smallest, cheapest SSD you can buy right now is the OCZ Vertex 30GB at £113 (£3.76/GB) and the fastest one is the Intel X-25 Extreme 32GB at £517 (£16.56/GB!).

So that’s the state of play at the start of 2009 – we’ll come back to this article next year to see how things have changed!