So much data

My first laptop in 1998 had a 2.1GB hard drive. Now, we have 20TB hard drives and there's more to come:

Seagate recently published its long-term technology roadmap revealing plans to produce ~50 TB hard drives by 2026 and 120+ TB HDDs after 2030. In the coming years, Seagate is set to leverage usage of heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), adopt bit patterned media (BPM) in the long term, and to expand usage of multi-actuator technology (MAT) for high-capacity drives.

The capacity jumps over the past two decades have been phenomenal.

Seagate and Western Digital have been looking to radically increase sequential and random performance of HDDs by installing more than one actuator, with multiple read/write heads into one drive. Seagate's Mach.2 technology — which embraces two actuators — can almost double IOPS-per-TB performance of a hard drive and substantially increase its sequential read/write speeds.

Soon, we'll have mainstream SSDs with sustained transfer speeds of two gigabytes per second. Most hard drives manage only 10% of that. They're basically separate beasts. Nowadays, one should get both for the desktop: an SSD for the main drive and the hard drive for extra storage and backup. However, for most laptop buyers, solid state disks are a superior choice because of speed. Plus, who wants to carry around a slow 20TB drive in their laptop anyway?