Storage growth sets a fast pace (BBC) {terabyte drives for every user soon?}

By Ian Hardy
Click's North America technology correspondent

A decade ago a 500 megabyte (MB) photo collection was something to boast about. Nowadays it is more likely be a collection measured in the gigabytes.

But as our appetite for storage continues to grow thankfully so does the capacity of our hard drives.

Hitachi has unveiled a drive which has reached the new heights of one terabyte (TB). Its drive looks like any other, but uses perpendicular magnetic recording to make space for all that data.
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With so much data being written to the hard drive, wear and tear is inevitably a concern. So the Hybrid Storage Alliance is promoting a new laptop unit with a built in flash chip that stores all the data you are currently calling on.
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"A hybrid solution will extend your battery life. If you're on a plane for two or three hours and you don't want to stop working on a project you want to keep going - so battery is really important in a laptop PC," said Joni Clark, chair of the Hybrid Storage Alliance.
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more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/6324109.stm

Remember the old "dollar a megabyte" rule? :rofl:

There's a corollary to Moore's law such that software gets twice as big every (say) 24 months. There was a day when you could run a word processor on 4 kilobytes of RAM (sometime in the 70s, with a Sperry Univac), but spell checking was out of the question. Today your average MS Word eats ~75,000 times the memory, so software bloat doubled 16 times in 30 years.