Storage has come a long way, and has a long way to go

When it comes to measuring data storage capacity, we have come a long way, and yet we have a long way to go. It goes without saying that the advancements in hard disk drive technology over the years have made this all possible. How incredible have the HDD’s advancements been? Here’s a few data points from the engineering team at Seagate that will blow your mind:

If automobiles would have progressed at the same pace as hard disk drives over the last 30-40 years…we would be driving cars that:

Get 25,000 miles per gallon
Weigh 8 ounces
Have a top speed of 1,000,000 miles per hour
Cost $15.00

If we could only move as fast as our data…check out how far we have come…in this infographic from the BBC Future c/o Visual.ly.

Editor’s note: Although the BBC Future graphic mistakenly uses binary calculations where it should use powers of 10 to represent kilobytes, megabytes, etc (http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/prefixes.html), the gist of the story stands up and is pretty amazing.