Soleron said:
The first 1TB HDD was unveiled in Jan. 2007. I don't see them much below $100 today, and drives above 1TB are very rare and expensive. SSDs are increasing in capacity much faster. The standard hard drive size has been stagnant at 320GB for some time. The first 15,000rpm HDD was availible in 2000. There still aren't any speeds above this, 9 years later.
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Advancement comes in many forms. They thought bigger platters were bigger, easier to store, yet higher speeds for biggers platters meant more force needed and possiblity or warping. This was when HDDs were almost foot wide platters and larger. Then came 5" platters for computers in the 80s, this was huge, it was now afforable and easy to get to the consumer. Why don't we use 5" platters now? We could easily fit over 1 TB per platter if we did! Well no advantage would be found, because a 5" platter can't go faster then 3200 RPM without warping. A 3.5" drive limit is said to be 10,000 RPM, and 15,000 for 2.5". Smaller, less force, but also less data, so it's a balance. Also comes this point. If there is more data per sector, a slower RPM does not mean slower read speed. A 1 TB 7200 RPM drive will easily equal a 10,000 RPM 300 gig drive in speed.
Also, atomic holographic nanostorage devices are already working and will be on the market within 5 years, they store in a 3d medium and store 1.6 PETABYTES(1.6 million GB) of data per cubic CM. They also read at 400,000 times the bandwidth of traditional drives, and write just as fast.
