I am forever amazed at the relentless march of technology and the capacity of scientists and engineers to make things smaller and faster, and, in the context of hard disk drives, smaller, faster and bigger all at the same time.

Today, Seagate announced their latest hard drive. Whilst small with 12 Gigabytes of storage it is much smaller in all other respects.

40 mm x 30 mm x 5 mm. I find that truly stunning.

The very first hard drive I ever drooled over looked a bit like this one on the left.

When all you had was a 700kb floppy, 5 megabytes sounded like it would lap up a lifetimes worth of data and still have room for the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Problem was, it needed it’s own desk it was so big and it cost nearly £3000.

Today, that behemoth would just about hold half a Sheryl Crow mp3 track.