4 Terabyte Hard Drives in 3 Years Says Hitachi

"Japanese company Hitachi Ltd. says its researchers have successfully shrunken a key component in hard drives to a nanoscale that will pave the way for quadrupling today's storage limits to 4 terabytes for desktop computers and 1 terabyte on laptops in 2011."

A terabyte can hold 1 million books, 250 HD videos or a 250,000 songs.

Multimedia savers won't need to worry if their laptops, digital video recorders or MPs will have the storage capacity.

The feat is called giant magnetoresistance, or GMR.

The basis for the discovery was the work of two European scientists who won the Nobel Prize in physics last week.

GMR allows for extremely thin layers of alternating metals to detect weak changes in magnetism and was one breakthrough that led to the fastest growth rate in the new millenium…doubling every year.

Hitachi has the world's smallest disk drive heads – " 30-nanometer to 50-nanometer range, or about 2,000 times smaller than the width of an average human hair."

4 – Terabytes – before long, every library book, or every song, or every video will be on your laptop.

Meanwhile, Google will tell you how to find what you want among the stored data.

It's a good time to be young, eh?