The price of hard drives is falling steadily. I think this means that a lot of new technologies including solid state drives are in the pipeline. The drive in the click is $140, including shipping, for a terabyte (a million million bytes – or a thousand gigabytes).

I download a lot of video and mp3 files. I have more than I’ll ever use, but I don’t want to delete anything in case I need to listen to books on tapes again. I cut dvds from the video files (using DVDFLick) and Erica and I watch odd things when the TV selection is bad. I don’t want to delete any of these videos, even after we watch them because some day there will be an easy to use and configure way to watch them directly.

I bought a little disk sharing box that has a wifi antenna so you can access the terabyte from anywhere, but so far it doesn’t work unless the drive is formatted fat32 – not good for terabyte drives. I was hoping to network my drives and then stream video to the TV.

The technology is going fast, but the software has not quite caught up.

Consumer tech is still about 10 years behind (new cars advertise 40 gig hard drives as an option – like that means something).

Next Christmas there will be box similar to the Apple TV box that hooks up to your tv and cable, does DVR, connects to internet, plays streams from other computers and has a torrent client. It will have a terabyte drive and cost under $100.