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For years the hard-drive market has been driven by a simple rule: Users always want more storage space. But a series of innovations has lead to big advances in the last couple of years that have left the market on the verge of change.

"Drives now offer almost more capacity than the average user needs," said Currie Munce, director of advanced technology at IBM's storage systems division. He is referring to a new breed of hard drive that offers capacities exceeding 100GB of storage space--enough space for the files and documents of all but the greatest power users.

"People are starting to focus on performance," Munce said, adding he sees a greater emphasis in the near future on measures such as the disk speed and the physical size of the drive. Size is especially important in notebooks, when use of a 1.8-inch drive can enable manufacturers to reduce weight and system size over today's standard 2.5-inch drives.

Tivo Changes Our Needs

But just as PC users are beginning to appear satisfied with the storage on their desktop, a new kid has hit town: video recorders that use hard drives.

The market is popularized by the Tivo and Replay TV boxes, and is being explored by some major consumer electronics vendors. The units work like conventional VCRs but store the video data on a hard disk. Among the advantages are the capability to instantly access anything stored anywhere on the drive, the capability to simultaneously record one show while watching a previously recorded show, and an innovative function that lets users "pause" live television.

They chomp through storage space at the rate of about 1GB per hour. Because the drives are not removable, they also require a lot of storage space so users don't have to constantly juggle files to make room for new recordings.

"I would suggest that a 200GB drive would seem small when you get into digital television," said Munce. "200GB will be like a 2GB drive is today (on your computer). We will see capacities of 500GB when we get to digital video and data."

The market for such drives is currently small, but growing fast, according to a report released this week by market research company InStat/MDR. The company said it sees the hard disk-based video recorders jumping from 1.2 million units in 2001 to over 6 million in 2003. It expects sales revenues to jump from $550 million to $2.3 billion in the same two-year period.

"We will see lots of data in the home," Munce predicted. "It's hard to imagine in five years that most TVs won't be sold without a hard drive inside and a pause button on the remote control."

Next: Removable?

IBM is not the only hard-drive maker with such a vision. For several years, Japan's largest drive makers have been working on a new class of device: audio visual hard drives. These are designed for use with multimedia files, which tend to be longer and stored as one continuous file on the drive, unlike computer data, which is often in thousands of small files scattered across the disk.

As the vision of a digital home nears reality, some companies are also looking at a removable hard drive system that lets users pull a drive from their video recorder and plug it into a PC or other device. In March, eight of Japan's largest electronics companies detailed their plans for just such a system.

The companies have developed a system called Information Versatile Disk for Removable Usage. Physically, the IVDR cartridge is little more than a conventional 2.5-inch hard drive in a plastic case, with a new connector. The consortium is also developing protocols and file systems to enable the drive to be moved among devices.

Participants include Canon, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Phoenix Technologies, Pioneer, Sanyo, Sharp, and Victor of Japan (JVC), plus some electronics connector vendors.

IBM is also studying development of such a system, which goes beyond simply making the drive portable, Munce said.

"We've looked at some ideas and are looking at how you move data around," he said. "We will need security, digital-rights management, and data management. Today, it is all managed by the subsystem and host operating system so if you connect a hard disk to a digital camera, it has no clue what it is. In more portable applications, the intelligence of managing the data will move around with the device."

"I may have one instance of video data and want to display it on a PDA at first and then later on a high-definition TV, so how it is to be displayed will be different," Munce said. Systems will need the intelligence to marry stored portable data with a variety of devices, he said.

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