While capacity on hard disk drives has been doubling every 12 to 18 months -- faster than Moore's Law and integrated circuits -- there is a coming sea change that will drive the capacity up 10-fold, according to hard drive maker Seagate.

While that is remarkable, past changes and recent technology breakthroughs have led us to today's 6TB data center drives and 4TB desktop drives. Data storage is among the few techological advances that has actually surpassed our current needs.