Up until now, harddisk sizes used to double aout once per year.

But can the industry keep up with this trend. Researchers investigated the storage industry and came to the conclusion that they won't keep up this speed.
New technologies are being developed, but more often they will improve the quality of the disk rather than increase it's capacity.
Technologies like Serial ATA will make connection multiple harddisks cheaper and faster, but won't increase the sizes.

Harddisks aren't the only field of speculations. Optical disks like DVD also get new technological advancements, but here the different standards hold back evolution.

And the good old tape drives. They are supposed to be out of use, but every once in a while, some company comes up with another improvement making them bigger or faster.

In 2004 storage tools like portable USB sticks will florish the market, or so is speculated. New products with encryption will look cool and useful to some, but rather complicated to others.

Corporate users with big network-attached storage (NAS) tools will also have a hard time in 2004. The systems will get faster, bigger and with many more options.
Will administrators be able to find the best tool for the job in thousands of new products? Will they be compatible with previous installations? Probably not, which will increase the cost of investment, at which point corporate users might decide to keep there existing configuration and not profit from the new technologies.