I picked this up from a mailing list this evening. Hitachi is doing some amazing things in the storage business with some new research to increase the density of bits on the disk by standing the bits on their end on the disk surface instead of laying them down flat.
They are calling the technology Perpendicular recording and they expect to see a ten fold increase in the storage capacity meaning that your standard 3.5 hard disk enclosure could store up to one terabyte of data.
Once you factor in the extended uses for this storage capacity with devices like PVRs and “life recorders” then you can begin to see the implications.
P.S. Do check out the Flash animation. I can just imagine some research dude coming into the lab one morning say “Dudes – I had this wierd dream last night, what if we . . .”.