About 14 years ago, 540 MB, yes, MB, hard drives were the most popular, and the possiblity to get a 640 MB hard drive was really fascinating. You could store data of about a hundred floppy drives into it, fill it with games, and c programs, and even run Windows 3.1 on it. What would world be like if there is a 740 mb drive then? Those were the thoughts when we were kids learning C programming at a local computer training centre.
A few months later, the 1 GB hard drive came out, and with new windows 3.1 applications too rolling out, the possiblities were endless. Then the 2 GB came out, then the 4.7 GB, then it was 10, then 20, 32, 40, 80, 120, 160, 250, 500, and now the most popular drive around is 1 TB. And I still cant get enough of storage, or dump my DVDs into my new 500 GB drive. i guess I will have to buy another one and RAID them together to get 1 TB, and when the price of the 1 TB drive comes down, get one of those as well and raid them all together.
My main drive that hosts the operating system is still a good old 40 gb drive, which is for the operating system alone, and absolutely no files are stored on it.
DVD drives are still slow. When hard disk to hard disk copy only takes very little time, as the data transfers in about 30 MB per second, the DVD drive with a lot of struggle supplies only 6 to 7 MB per second. Hope the blue ray thing that is coming up is faster than this.