So what actually adds up when it comes to electronic storage? Is it like anything else in the dollar store? You buy enough of it, and it turns out to be a lot of money? Not really. Sure, cost piles up, but that cost is going down over time. What isn't going down over time is electricity.
I had this little tidbit of information brought to my attention this morning by my colleague Bryan Collars, the Electronic Records and Imaging Supervisor at SCDAH. It's very useful because I often find it hard to explain to people why local storage is expensive when storage by itself....isn't. Although it shouldn't be difficult to explain why digitization is an expensive process (the cost of scanners, software, labor, etc.), I think it is because the response I usually get is: "But storage is so cheap!" Yes, but....
If you're interested in further information about the REAL cost of storage, click here to read a paper from 2013 on calculating that cost.
Citation of publication referenced:
Amit K. Dutta and Ragib Hasan, “How Much Does Storage Really Cost? Towards a Full Cost Accounting Model for Data Storage“, In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Economics of Grids, Clouds, Systems, and Services (GECON), Spain, September, 2013. [pdf]