As little as 5 years ago there the storage capacity barrier for computer hard drives was roughly 200GB.   Currently the largest storage capacity for storage is commercially available is about 2TB of data and the industry plans to double that within a year.  The reason for the jump in storage capacity of at least a magnitude can be directly linked to the work of the German and French researchers Peter Grunberg and Albert Fert.  Their work on giant magnetoresistance (GMR) allowed the hard drive industry to develop much more sensitive drive heads.   Some of the most current hard drives can be found at wwwhard-disk-drivescom.

The basic design of a hard drive has not changed much since it’s development by IBM in 1954.   A typical hard disk drive (HDD) is made of a magnetized disk called a platter,  on a spindle with actuator arm which moves the read-writes head over the disk.   Multiple platters can be added for greater storage capacity.  The exponential changes in the amount of data that can be placed on HDDs has significantly changed the consumer electronics market by making devices that require high data storage, commercially viable such as digital video recorders and players.  

Looking on the web for the latests HDDs wil lead you to sites like wwwhard-disk-drivescom, where you can look though all the brands of HDDs that are on the market.  There is currently a parallel development in Hard Drive technology.  The development of commercial solid state drives has reached a point where they are being used more and more often in laptops and netbook computers.  The solid state drive (SSD) is a lot less fragile than the HDD because it has no moving parts.  It also has a speed advantage because there is no need for a read-write head to access data.   

While the SSD has a number of advantages over the HDD, it cannot compete when it comes to storage.  Economically it’s difficult to make an affordable SSD that can store more than 128 GB of data. Because of the rapid development of SSD’s there are now hybrid drives on the market that use SSDs as a buffer for the HDD.