On 29 Oct 2001, Perry E. Metzger wrote:

> At substantially less than a penny per meg these days (and falling
> fast), the disk savings ARE entirely trivial.

Well, there's theoretical marginal cost, and then there's real world cost.
Let's look at an example of the latter: what it would cost for me to
add at least 1 MB of disk space to epistolic.cynic.net.

First, since it's a Sparc IPX, I have to buy a new SCSI disk bigger than
my current one, because there's only room for one drive in it. Since
it's only a 1 GB drive, this is not such a big deal. I can get something
that will add at least a megabyte to my system for $50.

Now I have to get to the machine. Round trip airfare from Tokyo to
Vancouver is currently running about $500, if you're lucky. But to get
that, you have to stay over a Saturday. So add another $100 for hotel,
meals, etc.

So now I'm at a $650 cash outlay, plus whatever value I happen place on
two days of my time.

Obviously, I should just hire a consultant to do this. If I'm really
lucky, I can probably pay someone else that I trust $200 to do this
upgrade for me, so it's perhaps $250. Still rather a lot more than a
penny per megabyte.

Or were you volunteering to upgrade this machine for me, if I give you
a good premium? I really wouldn't mind an extra gigabyte on it, which
is worth about $10 according to your calculations, so how about if I
give you $25 and you somehow upgrade the current capacity by another GB? :-)

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson  <cjs@cynic.net>   +81 3 5778 0123   http://www.netbsd.org
    Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light.  --XTC