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Buzz of the moment? Storage, and the abundance of it. To quote Microsoft Research's Rick Rashid: "you can store every conversation you've ever had in a terabyte. You can store every picture you've ever taken in another terabyte. And the Net Present Value of a terabyte is USD 200."





* Case in point: Samsung's latest camera/music phone, the SGH-I300, comes with a 3-gigabyte (!) hard disk drive that can store as many as 2,000 photos or hundreds of MP3s. Wow.

* IBM is working on a device that uses almost no power, "is about the size of a single Advil," but has enough data storage capacity to "record everything that happens to you all day long". The technology is called MRAM, or magnetic random access memory, and understanding how it works probably requires a degree in quantum physics. Bottom line is, "over the next five to seven years, MRAM is supposed to make it possible to store 400 times more data in the same space as today's hardest, densest hard drives." (Source: Reveries.com.) Another wow.





* Toshiba has announced it will ship an 80GB version of the 1.8 inch hard drive found in the iPod by Q3 of 2005, while at the bottom of the storage market, 128 MB SD cards now sell for a mere USD 1.95 after rebate, which works out to about 1.5 cents per megabyte. Soon they'll be giving them away with a Big 'N' Tasty?
For the millions of Asian LIFE CACHERS who prefer to store their entire life collections of music, pics and texts on a USB stick, worn dangling from their necks, Pretec's iDisk II is a must-have: it's the world's smallest 8GB(!) USB flash drive. (Source: Engadget.)



* Make way for Family File Servers: the Iomega NAS 100d provides 160 gigabytes of storage space, selling for USD 499, and includes software to automatically back up family pictures and other important documents to the network drive."