A terabyte for less than a grand! Now, that's progress.

Maxtor's new OneTouch III external drive connects to a PC, Macintosh, or Linux computer and holds a trillion bytes of data (actually a bit less than a true terabyte, which is 1,024⁴ or 1,099,511,627,776 bytes). This device is fast and silent and can be comfortably carried in a backpack or a thick briefcase. Open up the box and you'll actually find two 500-gigabyte hard drives: the OneTouch III uses a technology called RAID (redundant array of independent disks) to combine the drives into a single high-capacity virtual device.

I have been using external hard drives for large-scale data storage for more than a decade. Of course, the definition of "large-scale" has changed considerably over that time. I bought my first external hard drive back in 1993; it cost $995 and stored one gigabyte. In the intervening years, engineers have improved magnetic storage technology even faster than they've increased computers' processing power. In 1993, my desktop workstation ran at a clock speed of 33 megahertz and had 32 megabytes of RAM; my desktop computer today runs at 100 times that speed and has 32 times as much RAM. But the Maxtor holds a thousand times as much data as my first external drive.