Hard drives get smaller, store more data, cost less and die quickly

Twenty years ago the hard drives I recall using might not have been fast in the data transfer stakes, they were certainly not lithe and sexy pieces of hardware and I prefer not to think how much I actually paid for a large and clunky bit of kit to store hardly any data at all. One thing they did have going for them was reliability though. Indeed, in the space of a decade I think I only needed to replace a single failed unit across a dozen or so computers. And that had something to do with me dropping the amber gas plasma screened, laughingly called a laptop, device while trying to live the mobile computing fantasy we had all been sold.