My daughter has kacked two hard drives in her IPod that I've had to repair on my own. My wife has one of those 8 GB IPod Nanos, with a solid-state memory. Only a quarter of the space, but I bet you could drop it with less worry.

The tech and content for this kind of thing are swirling around rapidly, and I don't know where it's going to end up. I got my daughter a laptop with 75 GB of hard drive in it, figuring it would last forever. My entire data drive, containing every damn thing I've done for almost twenty years, including a lot of heavy-duty high-res renderings, everything I've every written, all my e-mail files, every digital photo, and all the rest, runs 68 GB.

She almost filled it. Had to spend an afternoon cleaning it off.

The Achilles heel of storage space is downloadable movies and TV shows. Who knew? There were no Itunes TV shows when I bought the laptop.

Now we're supposed to download this much stuff into IPods?

I knew video rental stores were dead meat several years ago, when they started burying optical fibers in my street, but I had no idea that the standard connections would get good enough to handle video downloads.

There will be plenty of market for the biggest, fattest flash drives humans will be able to build, and thus the prices will fall very quickly.

twenty years ago I bought a Core 43 MB hard drive for $1,700. There were cheaper ones, but few better. If someone had told me I would someday be able to store 4 GB on something the size of my thumb for about $100, I would have been, to say the least, skeptical.

Kanguru is coming out with a 64 GB flash drive for about $600. About three inches long, and would hold almost ALL my data.