store 4,000 digital slides for $189

Today I was at Fry's Electronics and found an acomdata 1TB external hard drive for $189.  There was one per customer so I bought two :)

A typical digital slide is about 250MB, so this drive can hold 4,000 digital slides.  That works out to about four cents per slide, to store them forever.  The little blue light along the front even flashes purple as the drive is accessed, so you get a free light show to go with your inexpensive bits.

One of the key factors in the adoption of digital pathology is the way advances in basic computer technology have driven the cost down.  Really great 24" monitors are now $600.  High-bandwidth DSL connections are available just about everywhere for $50/month.  Servers cost a fraction of what they did five years ago, and a smaller fraction of what they did ten years ago.  And the biggest factor is the incredible increase in storage capacity and corresponding decrease in storage cost.  This 1TB drive isn't an outlier, it is just the latest data point in a steady curve.