From time to time, I buy hard disks, the biggest size I recently bought was in fact 80GBs. I had a bunch of disks of that size for my office, naturally, I was surprised to find out that typical drives these days are about 160GBs of space, and in fact, I was offered one with 320GBs for about $100. I ordered two drives, instead, of the smaller kind. And to think, my first hard drive was 80MBs of space running Windows 3.1 in 1995. Things have come along way.

But this report in the BBC NEWS | Technology | Drive advance fuels terabyte era suggests that far bigger drives are just around the corner…

Drive advance fuels terabyte eraHard diskHard drives currently have a one terabyte limitA single hard drive with four terabytes of storage (4TB) could be a reality by 2011, thanks to a nanotechnology breakthrough by Japanese firm Hitachi.The company has successfully managed to shrink the read-write head of a hard drive to two thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair.The smaller head can read greater densities of data stored on the disk.

Looks like we’ll have lots of space to store all those pictures, audio and movies! I think we’re going to need it!

But I do have an odd question: what do you do with still functional hard drives that you have pulled out of your computer for various reasons. I have two portable drives right now, but now I have an extra 20GB disk drive that I don’t quite know what to do with. Suggestions?

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