The piece of Hardware that stores your programs and data "permanently" - ie after the power goes off. You probably know what a hard disk is.
Hard drives used to have capacity measured in MegaBytes -- these days it's in GigaBytes.
A typical cheap IDE hard disk drive these days might cost around NZ$200 for 40-60 GibiBytes of data. SCSI drives are typically slightly more expensive.
The standard method of measuring large amounts of data (in the mainstream media) appears to be LibraryOfCongress x n.
This image is a disk platter used at StanfordUniversity in the 1960s. I put a $1 note in the lower-right corner to give you an idea of the platter's size. This platter could store 4 megabytes of data. The black mark around it is from a disk head crash (!!).
See also DrivePartitioning?, BackupNotes, FileSystems, 
Category:DiskNotes and HowToUltraDMA?.
45 pages link to HardDisk:
