The upper limit for writing data has been found
US scientists have found the theoretical maximum speed that data can be written to a PC's hard drive.
...............The good news is that this is still one thousand times faster than the best magnetic hard drives in use today

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3647055.stm

I read that this morning on /.

Interesting article but they miss a couple of extremely valid points. This is only applicable to magnetic media, not any of the new forms of storage media that are currently being designed.

It also considers only writing to one disk using one data stream. As one comment so eloquently put it this morning; this problem was already solved in the 80s with the creation of the parallel port!

Anyway, the speeds they hypothetically assume to be the fastest possible are around 1Tbps. Anyone still using magnetic media when we hit this 'barrier' is going to be the problem, not the speed of storage.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/22/cern_landspeedrecord_caltech/

A team of boffins from CERN and Caltech has set a Internet2 Land Speed Record by transferring data across 11,000km at an average rate of 6.25Gbps. Puny broadband, by comparison, manages only around 1Mbps - or 2Mbps if you are very lucky - making it approximately 10,000 times slower.

That's about 1 DivX DVD-RIP per second! Or alternately a full DVD image in about 6 seconds!