Wow … the doubling continues. There are two key points that I
like about this article. The first is that 500GB PC disk drives
will be on the market this year. That is now 100,000 times the
capacity of my first hard disk drive that I ever had! The 100,000 times growth in capacity has occurred in less than 30 years.

The second key point is that it shows no sign of stopping. From this article:

Desktop drive capacity will top out at around 1 terabyte by late 2006,
before running into technological problems in maintaining data
stability.

We are on track to again double by the end of next year! It is
difficult to image that common, and eventually commodity, hard disk
drives will reach these sizes. That is a huge amount of
data. In addition, as humans we will simply solve the tough
problems and continue the growth rates with newer technologies.

A last point is that there are currently numerous solutions – the most
popular referred to as RAID – that allow you to aggregate multiple disk
drives into a redundant array that appears as one, even larger, disk
drive. I have been tracking solutions like this over the years to
mentally track the cost of a terabyte of storage. I am now
stunned that in the next year, I might be buying one terabyte of hard
disk storge in a single PC disk drive.

PC World: PC Drive Reaches 500GB.
Demand for greater capacity continues to rise due in large part to a
growing need for music and video storage on PCs and consumer
electronics devices. To meet that need, storage vendors are turning to
new recording technologies. The first of these, perpendicular
recording, will debut from Toshiba this year. [Tomalak’s Realm]