There's a reason why enterprise storage investments are among the least-soft sectors of IT spending. It's almost impossible for any organization to know too much. Even in industry sectors that don't seem strongly data-driven, it's knowledge that creates competitive advantage. The strategic assets of a company such as Exxon Mobil Corp. aren't so much the oil in the ground as they are the costly logging of data from test wells, identifying where production drilling will pay. Storage must be measured not just in gross terms of capacity but also in net terms of useful access vs. cost.
Capacity alone is hard pressed to keep up with the flood tide of new bits.
But mere quantity measures fail to reflect the increasing complexity of the tasks that storage systems are expected to perform. Raw data retrieval times continue to improve at impressive rates, but perhaps not quickly enough to offset more elaborate queries that involve a greater number of data relations. The greatest distortion in simple measurements of storage capacity growth is in their failure to reflect the growing cost of duplicates. For every e-mail sent, every Usenet message posted, every new Windows device driver written and distributed, dozens or thousands or millions of copies soon occupy space along chains of servers or on uncountable separate workstations. It's fortunate that magnetic hard disks have surpassed most 20th century projections as to their physical limits.