My first hard drive held, wait for it, 10 megabytes. And I never filled it.
I bought it to run a pharmacology teaching program that cost $900 and came on 8 floppy discs.
This laptop is almost 4 years, been saving lots and am only up to 70GB, got twice that to go.
I’ve got some vintage ads saved, a 10MB HDD for $3398, a 15MB @ $2495+ install kit[s] from Radio Shack, and other old tech. I finally learned, when it comes to new tech, wait 3-6 months, it’ll cost a third of the price. Too soon old, too late smart. ;)
My first hard drive was a Syquest I believe, 44 mb, running on an Apple II, so, ProDOS’ max volume size was 32 mb. I forget how much it cost, the cartridges were 5.25 winchesters in a plastic box, and they worked great, and were what back then seemed like ridiculously portable. The printing / rendering biz’s around Grand Rapids all have ‘em, because at that time 44 mb would hold a huge amount of graphics and publisher files.
The first ad I remember for a one gig drive was in one of the deep geek mags, and priced (if memory serves) $10K — but we were all in awe, you can run an entire company on a one gig (and back then, one could). Now a camera, or phone, or even a wristwatch, comes with more than 1 gb. Anyway, the price came down fast.
The first retail terabyte drive I saw was $400, and that seemed hilarious. Now 1 tb is well under $100 (internal or external) and 128 gb flash drives are available. A four pack of 8 gb Sandisk Facets is $22 and change at, uh, one of the warehouse clubs.