Relevant to this: memory cost per GB dropped exponentially every year from the days of the earliest computers until 2010 or so, reaching $4/GB in 2011. A decade

Relevant to this: memory cost per GB dropped exponentially every year from the days of the earliest computers until 2010 or so, reaching $4/GB in 2011. A decade and a half later it's still in the $2-$4/GB range. Note also that SSDs started out only slightly cheaper per GB than DRAM - the 80GB Intel X25-M had a list price of about $500 when it was released in 2008, and references I find on the net show a street price of about $240 for the next-gen 80GB device in 2009. Nowadays you can get a 1TB NVMe drive for about the cost of 16GB of RAM, although you might want to spend a few more bucks to get a non-sketchy device.