Maybe, with the advent of laptops becoming more popular than desktops, there is just a bigger market for them. Cost is usually due to demand constraints.
Server farms store data for actual people. So sit back and think about how much unique data you have on servers somewhere. Add it up and I dont't think the total data storage at all data centers everywhere in the US add up to more that 20GB per person in the US as we are just not that interesting even at 5x redundancy your still at 1/30th a drive per person. Don't forget at 300 million people that would still be 10 Million drives which is a lot of servers.
PS: The NSA could be recording every phone call ever made and it's still not all that much actual data.
Google Maps stores a 'tiny' amount of data per person. The surface area of the earth is a little less than 200million square miles or a little less than 2/3 of a square mile a person. at 1 foot accuracy that would only be two 10 megapixel pictures per person not that we actually have maps anywhere near that good of most small towns let alone the oceans or arctic. The only thing that really spit's out data is raw scientific data, but even Nasa just dumps well over 99% of what they collect so it's more of a short term problem.
