Writes Lee Gomes in the WSJ in “An Ode to Computer Disk Drives”:
Today, IBM makes a gigabyte drive the size of your thumb, and an entry-level Dell PC comes with a 20-gigabyte drive. Seagate says that over the next dozen or so years, it expects to increase drive capacities a thousandfold. That sounds preposterous, until you realize that’s exactly what the industry has done in the past 12 or so years.
In three or four years, a few hundred dollars will buy a terabyte-size drive, or 1,000 gigabytes. Who needs that much storage? You do! Imagine one of those laptop DVD players, the sort first-class passengers get on airplanes, but all-digital, and holding 1,000 movies.
