storage
I've seen a lot of people play The Computer Performance Shell Game poorly. They overinvest in a fancy CPU, while pairing it with limited memory, a plain jane hard drive, or a generic video card. For most users, that fire-breathing quad-core CPU is sitting around twiddling its virtual
storage
In the last three years, I've gone from carrying a 512 MB USB memory stick to a 16 GB USB memory stick. That's pretty amazing. According to the storagereview.com archives, hard drives with 16 GB of storage were introduced sometime around the beginning of 1999.
hardware
I recently had a noisy fan failure in my ASUS Vento 3600 case. The particular fan that failed was the 80mm fan in the front panel, which is responsible for circulating air by the hard drives in the front of the case. I disconnected it while I considered my options.
storage
I recently upgraded my home system with one of the 750 gigabyte Seagate perpendicular drives [http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_head/pr/PerpendicularAnimation.html] in order to consolidate a number of hard drives I had on my server. 750 gigabytes is a tremendous amount of storage space in