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A few years ago, a 20-gigabyte hard disk was a giant. Today, the standard disk drive is more than 6 times that size. Disk drive technology is always improving, and you can count on hard drives getting larger and faster in the future. Meanwhile, scientists are experimenting with exotic technologies such as holographic crystal storage that could subsume anything using today's magnetic technology. But in the near future, the most likely replacement for the traditional hard disk is the high-speed, high-capacity optical disk drive.
Personal computers already have optical drive disks. They're called CD's, and today they're used mainly as transportation for new software and as a medium to back up files or transfer them to another computer.
Until recently, only drives with fixed metal platters in a hermetically sealed housing could produce the combination of speed, capacity and reliability required of a computer's main storage device.
Now, however, you can find drives with removable, $100 cartridges that store a gigabytes of data and operate almost as fast as standard hard drives.
As a primary drive, one of these gadgets can give your computer multiple personalities -- pop one cartridge in and you're running Windows; add another for Linux. If you have a computer at home and another at work, you can literally take everything with you on a single disk. Lock up the disk at night and your security worries are gone. As a second disk drive, it can provide almost infinitely expandable storage. When you fill up a 100-gigabyte cartridge, just buy another. No sweat.
In the coming years, with hard drive storage becoming less expensive and more portable, computer users can literally storage information into the Terabytes right on their own home computers.
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