Modern hard drives store an incredible amount of data in a small space, and are still the default choice for high-capacity (though not highest-performance) storage. While hard drives have been around since the 1950s, the current 3.5″ form factor (actually 4″ wide) appeared in the early 1980s. Since then, the capacity of a 3.5″ drive has increased by about 106 times (from 10 MB to about 10 TB), sequential throughput by about 103 times, and access times by about 101 times. Although the basic conce...