Figure 1

Trends in storage, transfer, and sequencing costs. The historiccosts of low-end hard disk drives were taken fromhttp://www.jcmit.com/diskprice.htm. They had been halvingevery 12 months in the 1990s and around 2000–2004. Then, the doublingtime lengthened suddenly, to about 25 months. The real costs of sequencing,taken from the NHGRI Web page [5], reflect not only reagent costs like some studies show, but alsoinclude labor, administration, amortization of sequencing instruments,submission of data to a public database, etc. The significant change insequencing costs around 2008 was caused by the popularization of the secondgeneration technologies. The prices of the Amazon storage and transferreflect the real market offers from the top data centers. It is interestingthat the storage costs at data centers drop very slowly, mainly because thecosts of blank hard disks are only a part of the total costs of maintenance.The curves were not corrected for inflation.