What is the general relationship between storage speed and cost?

What is the general relationship between storage speed and cost?

• A. Faster storage is cheaper per unit
• B. Faster storage tends to be more expensive per unit
• C. Storage speed has no impact on cost
• D. Slower storage is more expensive

Answer: (B)

Faster storage tends to be more expensive per unit of capacity. The reason is that higher-speed storage—such as DRAM, NVMe SSDs with PCIe interfaces, and fast enterprise SSDs—requires more advanced materials, controllers, and interfaces to deliver low latency and high IOPS. Those capabilities cost more to manufacture, so the cost per gigabyte or per IOPS goes up. Slower storage like traditional hard disk drives or magnetic tape is cheaper per gigabyte but offers far lower performance, which is why it’s used for bulk, less time-sensitive data. In practice, organizations use tiered storage to balance cost and performance, placing hot, frequently accessed data on fast storage and colder data on slower, cheaper storage. The other options contradict this well-established relationship: faster storage isn’t cheaper per unit, and speed clearly affects cost.