Stories like this are amazing when I stop to think that the Amiga 3000 I have sitting next to me here at work that I bought over a decade ago has a full-height SCSI hard drive that holds only 500 Megabytes or so. Now Toshiba is set to introduce a record-setting 0.85-inch hard disk drive that will come in capacities of up to 4 Gigabytes. That’s roughly 8 of my old Amiga’s hard drives in a package not much bigger than a quarter. It’s intended for use in cell phones, digital camcorders and other similar devices. The folks at Guinness were impressed too:
CNN.com - Guinness record for world’s smallest disk drive - Mar 16, 2004
“Toshiba’s innovation means that I could soon hold more information in my watch than I could on my desktop computer just a few years ago,” said David Hawksett, science and technology editor at Guinness World Records.
Meanwhile at the other end of the extreme the folks at Hitachi are about to release their newest 3.5” hard drive with a 7200 RPM speed that holds a massive 400 Gigabytes. The drive is already being tested by the TiVo folks as they push forward with plans to make their PVRs able to support HDTV content. In a current TiVo an hour of programming consumes about 1 Gigabyte so a TiVo with one of these new drives could record 400 hours of standard programming and up to 45 hours of HDTV programming.
I can’t begin to imagine what a pain in the ass it’ll be to backup a drive that big, or defrag it for that matter.
Posted on 03/18/2004 at 06:03 AM 
It’s reckoned that most modern computers nowadays don’t need defragging very often at all - monthly at most. The performance hit cause by a fragmented drive isn’t as severe on newer machines than on older ones.