CNET looks at the future of harddrives, and how data density can continue to increase.  As the article points out, the current method of storing data, after a certain density, could become volitile at room temperature, to say nothing of the temperatures seen in some overclocked systems.  The next few years should be interesting for the R&D departments of major storage manufacturers.

"To increase the areal density, which is the amount of data a single platter inside a hard drive can

hold, engineers have shrunk the size of bits and grains over the years. This has helped PC makers to

boost the capacity of hard drives from a few megabytes to more than 100 gigabytes.

Successive years of shrinkage, however, have led to magnetic grains that measure about 8 nanometers

long. (A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.)

Reducing the grains further in size could cause them to flip at room temperature and so corrupt the

data--an aspect of the "superparamagnetic effect," first identified in the mid-1990s by Stan Charap of

Carnegie Mellon University. And cutting back on the number of grains inside each bit, absent further

changes, would increase noise and lower reliability."

Here are some more Storage reviews from around the web:

  
Storage

• Fantec

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• ICY DOCK MB722 5.25" SATA Mobile Hard Drive Rack @ PC Apex
• Inching toward the NAS of our dreams

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• Surviving Disk Crashes - Part 2

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• Sans Digital MS2C1 Drive

  Enclosure @ PC Mechanic

• USB 2.0 To

  SATA/IDE Adapter With One Touch Backup @ ThinkComputers

• Samsung BD-P1000 Blu-ray DVD

  Player @ Futurelooks

• Verbatim 4GB Store

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