Back in the olden days all storage relied on papyrus; now, we have flash memory and tiny hard-drives that can contain the whole world’s papyrus content many times over.  You won’t find that statistic quoted anywhere in Samsung’s press-release for its latest SpinPoint N2 drive, but I know for a fact that the Egypt-obsessed engineers behind it had ancient paper in mind when they fashioned the 1.8-inch-platter based 160GB dinky behemoth. 

“But Chris,” I hear you moan, whispering like cheap nylon underwear during a brisk walk, “why should I care?”  Well, soldier, you should care because it’s these super-small containers of binary brilliance that Apple (among others) use in their portable gadgetry.  The 80GB fifth-gen iPod, for instance, uses a 1.8-inch drive – if it had 160GB you could store up to 40,000 tracks.

There’s no guarantee that Apple will take advantage of all this new capacity on offer, but with rumours about a refreshed media-dedicated iPod line continuing to flourish – and the company’s history of using top-spec components before rivals can get their hands on them – I wouldn’t be surprised to see a super-capacity PMP sometime soon.