One useful perspective to consider is the costs of computation compared to the costs of the experiment. Considering sequencing costs alone (ignoring costs of o

One useful perspective to consider is the costs of computation compared to the costs of the experiment. Considering sequencing costs alone (ignoring costs of obtaining & processing a biological sample), Illumina's current cheapest sequencing kits - Novaseq S4 300 cycles - cost ~$15k for 3000 Gbases of data (whole-genome sequencing for about 24 people). As gziped fastqs, that data will occupy about 1.3TB of space. Extremely high-volume purchasers may be able knock that sequencing price down some, but the storage challenge starts to seem less intimidating when you realize spending 5% of your sequencing budget on storage would give you a budget of $750/TB of data.