Will hard drives finally stop shrinking?

There have been explosive growth in the sales of small digital consumer electronic devices such as still and video cameras, TiVo personal video recorders (PVRs), and MP3 players like Apple Computer´s iPod. As these devices have gained capabilities, they have needed larger storage capacities in smaller packages, often in the form of hard drives. For handheld and consumer electronic devices, the increasingly popular minidrives are generally up to 1.8 inches in diameter with storage capacity of up to 60 Gbytes. However, vendors have been releasing drives just 1 inch in diameter, and some, such as Toshiba, have announced drives as small as 0.85 inches in diameter. Various experts say the technology for shrinking disk technology has reached its limit and that there is little demand or market pressure for smaller drives. If vendors can´t reduce drive size, companies that want to shrink their devices further may have to turn to flash memory or other types of smaller storage. This potential for losing business has forced drive vendors to look for ways to adjust.