Jon -

In the 2002 article he predicted the 1TB drive "in about 5 years." It's here now, from any of a handful of sellers, for under 1K$.

He also predicts the 120 TB drive (1,000x the 120GB one he had in hand at the time of the article) by 2012, and asks the interesting question "What .... are you gonna put on it." and "How are you going to find what's there if you do fill one up."

"You might start by copying over everything on your present disk—all the software and documents you've been accumulating over the years—your digital universe. Okay. Now what will you do with the other 119.9 terabytes?"
"If you read one book a day, every day of your life, for 80 years, your personal library will amount to less than 30 gigabytes, which still leaves you with more than 119 terabytes of empty space. To fill any appreciable fraction of the drive with text, you'll need to acquire a major research library. The Library of Congress would be a good candidate. It is said to hold 24 million volumes, which would take up a fifth of your disk"

His estimate is for plain text storage, and only for the text, but that's still a mind-wiggler.

John