The price per megabyte for hard drive storage has dropped regularly as demand for capacity has increased. The table below shows how prices have tumbled over the last few years, with an approximate, average price per megabyte for the end-user. Figures are based on EIDE hard drives.

Of course, there are other things to consider when looking at these numbers. In 1992, it was possible to fit an operating system, word-processor, spreadsheet and database application onto a 20MB hard drive and still have room for several of the latest games. Since then, software bloat has led to applications expanding to fill the space available. Today's Windows applications are more user-friendly and intuitive (aren't they?), but they are certainly not as compact and tightly-coded as those of the early 1990s.

In terms of the number of complete applications that can be stored on the average hard drive, not a great deal has actually changed, although in the last couple of years the relationship between capacity and software bloat has increased in favour of capacity.