Hard to believe we didn’t blog this on October 9th, when ‘Two European scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics for what might be called the grandfathering of the iPod—a process that helps hard drives physically shrink, while still increasing storage capacity. In 1988, Frenchman Albert Fert and German Peter Grunberg each arrived at the same conclusion that changes to the magnetic field of a hard disk can be interpreted as the ones and zeros that form the basis for all electronic data.’

I mention it now because ‘Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (GST) announced that it expects to be shipping 4TB desktop and 1TB laptop drives by 2011. Meeting that news was a chorus of yawns all around from the techno-bloggers (”Hitachi announced 4TB HDDs by 2011. So?” read the headline on Ubergizmo), who instantly went back to obsessing about iPhone hacks and Japanese robots.’

The significance is that Kryder’s Law (which is to memory storage what Moore’s Law is to transistor density) is now enabled to continue at its logarhythmic pace. This in turns allows the next wave of innovation in wearable computing and more conventional gizmos to continue on the assumption that ever smaller devices will have sufficient memory for purpose.

I personally cannot believe the lack of attention that accompanied the commercial availability of 1-terabyte storage last month. it essentially means the table is set for the future.