Technology Review: Emerging Technologies and their Impact:

A new nano-optical device can focus laser light tighter than traditional optics, which could lead to higher-density data storage.

Faster. Cheaper. Smaller. Bring It On.

I was talking with friends, at work the other day, about how storage tech has improved over the years. I was a late entrant into the hard-drive game, my first PC hard drive was a (huge) 340 meg. People asked me why I'd ever want something so huge, what I'd possibly put on it. 6 months later, I added 420 meg drive to it. A year further on, I added a 1.08 gig (of course, by that stage, i was running 4 operating systems on the machine, the joys of being a low-level geek in the mid 90s).

Now, my Palm pilot has 64 meg of storage, my music player has 4 gig, my main camera has multiple 1 gig cards. My computers start with 80 gig hard drives, and go up to just under a terabyte in my main home server. Systems at work total around 30 terabytes.

We've come a long way from the 720k 3.5" floppy.