The end of the gigabyte is nigh

Storage technology is entering the 'tera-era', according to Hitachi, and this means we'll soon be bidding farewell to the gigabyte.

With many high-end computers offering more than 1,000GB of storage, Hitachi says that we will soon be thinking in terms of terabytes.

"Storage needs keep going up and up. Just over 20 years ago, people thought five megabytes was more than enough, but that’s only enough space for one or two songs today," said Nick Kyriacou of Hitachi.

Our need for greater amounts of storage space are down to our love of high-definition video and ever-increasing libraries of music.

One in five British consumers already requires more than 200GB of storage space, according to a survey carried out by the company.

Hitachi's survey also showed that the average Brit has content to the value of £600 stored on their hard disk.

How much storage space do you require? Are gigabytes old news? Have your say in the Web User forums.

www.hitachigst.com