160 Gigs in Your Hot Little Hand

Remember how giddy you were when the first iPod with a whopping 5 GB of memory was unleashed in 2000, enough storage for about 1,000 songs? Dude, 1,000 songs! Perhaps we've lost the ability to truly appreciate the ongoing memory-miniaturization trend, taking for granted the ever-expanding capacity of tiny electronics. More songs than I'll ever actually listen to in the palm of my hand? Whatever.

Maybe news of the new 160-gigabyte mini hard disk drive from Toshiba's Storage Device Division will finally reawaken our collective geeky awe. You thought this was a Macworld story, didn't you? More on that later. About the size of a credit card, the 1.8-inch Toshiba drive is designed for use in the next generation of handheld devices, according to the Computerworld article linked above.

A Seagate 5 GB micro drive is pictured, in absence of a Toshiba photo, but it gives you an idea of just how tiny these things are.

The recent unveiling of Apple's new 160-GB iPod Classic -- released precisely the same day as Toshiba's announcement -- is probably no coincidence, but neither company is talking. According to the new iPod's specs, 160 gigs is enough to hold 40,000 songs, 200 hours of video or 25,000 photos.

I'll bet 10 years from now my daughter will make fun of my little MP3 player that lacks the capacity to hold every song ever recorded. How embarrassing.

Photo courtesy of Zerocool2000, via Wikimedia Commons