What was the cost for a 1GB hard drive in 1986?

Sounds like someone wants us to do their homework :lol:

Best go look at Wikipedia

Here you go............https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive

Mostly the purpose is to help with pc issues

"Commercially Available" puts a big restriction on what you want. In 1986 the newest desktop PC equipment was hitting 16 to 20 MHz CPU speed and IDE hard drives were typically about 30 MB. The GB hard drive you cited by IBM certainly was NOT aimed at the desktop market - it was too huge and MUCH too expensive for that. I suspect, in fact, that it was a developmental device aimed mostly at research and bragging rights, and eventually for mainframe houses.

Bambiboom's comments triggered memories. At that time I was a graduate student in Physical Chemistry dong research in Far-Infrared absorption spectroscopy. Hardware limitations meant that such work was possible then only by using Fourier Transform Interferometry, and that only had become possible in the mid-1960's when MAINFRAME computers got powerful enough. The university's computer centre at that time ran an IBM 360/60 machine, I believe, and we were all happy when it expanded its core memory from 256 to 512 KB. Large data storage was by reel-to-reel tapes (1" wide). Fast random access data storage was by units called "Disk Packs". These were an earlier form of hard disk unit, but did NOT use the Winchester design of having the heads "float" on a thin boundary layer of air close to the disk surface. They used heads supported by rigid moving arms to maintain the proper clearance of head to disk surface. A "Disk Pack" consisted of about half a dozen 12" diameter magnetic platters mounted on a common vertical spindle about 6" high. It was kept in a protective case with a handling mechanism to make direct contact with the disk by hand unnecessary, The entire Disk Pack assembly could be transferred from its case into the drive unit that opened at the top and then closed for running. As it operated the disk pack spun on its central shaft while the drive unit moved arms carrying the heads over the individual disk surfaces. There were separate arms with heads for each disk in the pack all on a common head arm system. I don't know but I suspect they were using only ONE side of each disk. I don't remember the capacity of a single Disk Pack, but it must have been in the several MB region. I do remember that one service offered for scheduled times each day was the use of an interactive language and OS called AP/L. To run that, the mainframe operators shut down some other batch processing services and mounted the AP/L Disk Pack(s) in the drive(s). Users used a typewriter terminal (IBM's "golf ball" Selectric type) for interactive access, and were able to use a workspace of 32 KB at a time, although they had assigned to them each several possible 32 KB workspaces. Each workspace contained both programs and data and resided on the Disk Packs. So each user might have had up to 200KB of storage resources, and the system could support several dozen users simultaneously, probably using 2 to 3 Disk Pack drive units in the mainframe operating room.

In my research the data from the interferometer was recorded on 1" punched paper tape, then taken with job control punched cards and a bit of data to the computer centre, where the Fourier transform work was run as one of the batch jobs. The AP/L system I described above did not do this job. (The Fourier Transform job required significant storage, processing speed and file access not available in AP/L.) But I did use the AP/L system extensively for processing data from many other instruments measuring dielectric properties of samples covering the broad frequency range from 50 Hz up to 150 GHz. Most often these data analyses required fitting experimental data to linear regression lines and deriving dielectric propertied from them, and we had several AP/L programs written for these.