While SSDs are blisteringly fast, they still can't offer the capacities that the humble hard disk provides. Especially this one, because with 1.5 TB squeezed into its tiny little frame, it's the most memory-dense drive you can buy right now.

While the future of storage on your laptop is undoubtedly solid state, it's more difficult to predict how the huge tranches of data in server farms will be housed in the future. Recent suggestions, though, predict the rebirth of an old technology: the humble casette tape.

Western Digital is planning to launch a range of helium-filled hard drives. Not to make them lighter or higher-pitched, though: with a density one-seventh that of air, the gas reduces internal drag, in turn boosting performance.

Though hard disk drive technology has improved in recent times, you'd be a brave soul indeed to use one for more than a couple of years without backing it up. But now a team of scientists has made a hard disk from sapphire which it claims will last 1 million years—just don't expect to be able to afford it.

Seagate's latest hard drive has hit a milestone: it manages to squeeze in a data density of one terabit per square inch. It uses some extremely complex heat-assisted magnetic recording to do that, and in the process doubles the storage capacity of current hard disks. If that's not enough to get your head round, how…

Ignoring for a moment that Hitachi appears to have used a male model with fake fingernails, this Z-series HDD boast the privilege of (currently) being the fastest 7mm drive around—and comes in capacities of 160GB, 250GB and 320GB.

Looking for hard disk? Oh, buddy boy, have I got a deal for you. You want MBs? I've got 10 fat ones right here. Five, if you're not a heavy user. And you'll never believe the price... [RustyLime via Reddit]

Considering the fact that Windows XP is still the most-used OS worldwide, anyone considering swapping out their old hard drives for a new one should heed this advice: be careful. You may want to even consider not doing it.

A while ago I was considering putting low-powered 5400 RPM drives into a NAS. I was worried about performance, but Tom's Hardware shows us that drive speed isn't the bottleneck, and how slower drives can even beat faster ones.

The Aegis Padlock Secure Drive has its own keypad and admin feature to lock your data down. It also has 128-bit realtime or 256-bit AES hardware encryption, shock mounting, and come in sizes up to 500GB.