We all know that, generally speaking, buying the newest top-end part gets you the most performance. But in most cases, the premium you pay for that part covers a whole lot of other stuff as well that has no bearing on frame rates or video encoding times. We're talking about the added cost of covering research and…

While introducing the new ridiculously thin iMac, Apple also revealed its new Fusion Drive. What is it? It's a new storage system that supposedly combines the best of SSD and HDD. Basically, the speed of a SSD with the storage space of a big spinning HDD.

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.

Data, like all things, eventually dies. Your music, your movies, your documents, your files, your computer. You don't expect it to live forever but... what if it did? Hitachi claims that they've developed a new quartz glass plate that can store data forever.

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.

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…

The reason people are so pumped about solid-state hard drives right now is because they're super-speedy. But if you think your SSD is fast, just wait until a new breed of laser-based hard drives comes to market.

He's not as sexy as Ryan Gosling—then again, who is?—but dammit he's a hard drive with a mysterious past, a sweet jacket, and an awesome soundtrack.

Archos Android tablets. Typically considered also-rans, but these things do have a 1.5GHz dual-core processor and up to 250GB harddrives.