question: How has the storage capacity in hard drives and other memory storage devices increased while the physical size of these devices has decreased?
comment: At the end of the day, what they're ultimately trying to store is binary, 0s and 1s which is just checking whether something is there or not, or switched one way or the other way. In theory, you could represent such data with single molecules, atoms, or even electrons, but the technology isn't quite there yet, though that's where we're heading. So basically, the technology that is storing these values are shrinking, which allows for either smaller devices for the same amount of storage, more storage in the same size devices, or both. We also figure out more efficient ways of storing information. For example, the number 10000000 takes up 8 characters, but you could also represent the value as 10\^7 which only takes up 4 characters, not that that's how they're stored digitally, but just an example, similar methods can be used on storage to effectively store more data with less information needed to represent it.
passages: The notion of "large" amounts of data is of course highly dependent on the time frame and the market segment, as mass storage device capacity has increased by many orders of magnitude since the beginnings of computer technology in the late 1940s and continues to grow; however, in any time frame, common mass storage devices have tended to be much larger and at the same time much slower than common realizations of contemporaneous primary storage technology. The term "mass storage" was used in the PC marketplace for devices far smaller than devices that were not considered mass storage in the mainframe marketplace.
   Since 1956 the principle of storing information via magnetic domains has not changed much. As time progressed HDD drives were able to store more information than the original and the parts became much smaller, but the moving parts that are used in HDD drives were here to stay until nanoionic technologies began to be utilized in hard drives.
   In a more limited study, the International Data Corporation estimated that the total amount of digital data in 2007 was 281 exabytes, and that the total amount of digital data produced exceeded the global storage capacity for the first time.
  
  A study published in 2011 estimated that the world's technological capacity to store information in analog and digital devices grew from less than three (optimally compressed) exabytes in 1986, to 295 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 2007, and doubles roughly every three years.
  
  Section::::Further reading.
  
  BULLET::::- History of Computer Storage from 1928 to 2013
  
  BULLET::::- History of Computer Data Storage
   Data organization for low power
  
  Power consumption in relation to physical size of electronic hardware has increased as the components have become smaller and more densely packed. Coupled with high operating frequencies, this has led to unacceptable levels of power dissipation. Memory accounts for a high proportion of the power consumed, and this contribution may be reduced by optimizing data organizationthe way data is stored.
  
  Section::::Motivation.
   A 2003 UC Berkeley report estimated that about five exabytes of new information were produced in 2002, and that 92% of this data was stored on hard disk drives. This was about twice the data produced in 2000. The amount of data transmitted over telecommunication systems in 2002 was nearly 18 exabytes—three and a half times more than was recorded on non-volatile storage. Telephone calls constituted 98% of the telecommunicated information in 2002. The researchers' highest estimate for the growth rate of newly stored information (uncompressed) was more than 30% per year.
   It has been estimated that the year 2002 was the beginning of the digital age for information storage: an age in which more information is stored on digital storage devices than on analog storage devices. In 1986, approximately 1% of the world's capacity to store information was in digital format; this grew to 3% by 1993, to 25% by 2000, and to 97% by 2007. These figures correspond to less than three compressed exabytes in 1986, and 295 compressed exabytes in 2007. The quantity of digital storage doubled roughly every three years.
   The capacity of hard drives has grown exponentially over time. When hard drives became available for personal computers, they offered 5-megabyte capacity. During the mid-1990s the typical hard disk drive for a PC had a capacity of about 1 gigabyte. As of January 2019, desktop hard disk drives typically had a capacity of 1 to 6 terabytes, with the largest-capacity drives reaching 15 terabytes.
  
  Unit production peaked in 2010 at about 650 million units and has been in a slow decline since then.
  
  Section::::1950s–1970s.
   The need for long data sectors was first identified in 1998 when a technical paper issued by the National Storage Industry Consortium (NSIC) called attention to the conflict between continuing increases in areal density and the traditional 512-byte-per-sector format used in hard disk drives. Without revolutionary breakthroughs in magnetic recording system technologies, areal densities, and with them the storage capacities, hard disk drives were projected to stagnate.
   IBM introduced the first hard disk drive in 1956, as a component of their 305 RAMAC computer system. Most digital data today is still stored magnetically on hard disks, or optically on media such as CD-ROMs. Until 2002 most information was stored on analog devices, but that year digital storage capacity exceeded analog for the first time. As of 2007 almost 94% of the data stored worldwide was held digitally: 52% on hard disks, 28% on optical devices and 11% on digital magnetic tape. It has been estimated that the worldwide capacity to store information on electronic devices grew from less than 3 exabytes in 1986 to 295 exabytes in 2007, doubling roughly every 3 years.
   A new metric that is being used in an attempt to characterize the growth in person-specific information, is the disk storage per person (DSP), which is measured in megabytes/person (where megabytes is 10 bytes and is abbreviated MB). Global DSP (GDSP) is the total rigid disk drive space (in MB) of new units sold in a year divided by the world population in that year. The GDSP metric is a crude measure of how much disk storage could possibly be used to collect person-specific data on the world population. 
   As fabrication has improved, solid-state memory has improved dramatically in terms of performance. Modern DRAM chips had operational speeds on the order of 10 ns or less. A less obvious effect is that as density improves, the number of DIMMs needed to supply any particular amount of memory decreases, which in turn means less DIMMs overall in any particular computer. This often leads to improved performance as well, as there is less bus traffic. However, this effect is generally not linear.
  
  Section::::Effects on price.
   Driven by ever increasing areal density, HDDs have continuously improved; a few highlights are listed in the table above. Market applications expanded through the 2000s, from the mainframe computers of the late 1950s to most mass storage applications including computers and consumer applications such as storage of entertainment content.
   Teradata Corporation in 1984 marketed the parallel processing DBC 1012 system. Teradata systems were the first to store and analyze 1 terabyte of data in 1992. Hard disk drives were 2.5 GB in 1991 so the definition of big data continuously evolves according to Kryder's Law. Teradata installed the first petabyte class RDBMS based system in 2007. , there are a few dozen petabyte class Teradata relational databases installed, the largest of which exceeds 50 PB. Systems up until 2008 were 100% structured relational data. Since then, Teradata has added unstructured data types including XML, JSON, and Avro.
   One defining electrical property is the resistance of the wires inside the chips. As the cell size decreases, through the improvements in semiconductor fabrication that lead to Moore's Law, the resistance is reduced and less power is needed to operate the cells. This, in turn, means that less electric current is needed for operation, and thus less time is needed to send the required amount of electrical charge into the system. In DRAM in particular the amount of charge that needs to be stored in a cell's capacitor also directly affects this time.
   A number of technologies are attempting to surpass the densities of existing media.
  
  IBM aimed to commercialize their Millipede memory system at 1 Tbit/in in 2007 but development appears to be moribund. A newer IBM technology, racetrack memory, uses an array of many small nanoscopic wires arranged in 3D, each holding numerous bits to improve density. Although exact numbers have not been mentioned, IBM news articles talk of "100 times" increases.
   The rate of areal density advancement was similar to Moore's law (doubling every two years) through 2010: 60% per year during 1988–1996, 100% during 1996–2003 and 30% during 2003–2010. Speaking in 1997, Gordon Moore called the increase "flabbergasting", while observing later that growth cannot continue forever. Price improvement decelerated to −12% per year during 2010–2017, as the growth of areal density slowed. The rate of advancement for areal density slowed to 10% per year during 2010–2016, and there was difficulty in migrating from perpendicular recording to newer technologies.
   With the notable exception of NAND Flash memory, increasing storage density of a medium typically improves the transfer speed at which that medium can operate. This is most obvious when considering various disk-based media, where the storage elements are spread over the surface of the disk and must be physically rotated under the "head" in order to be read or written. Higher density means more data moves under the head for any given mechanical movement.
   In the late 1980s, less than 1% of the world's technologically stored information was in digital format, while it was 94% in 2007, with more than 99% by 2014. The year 2005 is estimated to be the year when human kind was able to store more information in digital, than in analog format (the "beginning of the digital age").
  
  It is estimated that the world's capacity to store information has increased from 2.6 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 1986, to some 5,000 exabytes in 2014 (5 zettabytes).
  
  Section::::Rise in digital technology use of computers, 1980–2016.:1990.
   Section::::Progression.:Information storage.:Exponential growth of data storage.
  
  The amount of digital data stored appears to be growing approximately exponentially, reminiscent of Moore's law.
  
  The amount of storage space available appears to be growing approximately exponentially (Kryder's Law).
  
  Section::::Progression.:Information transmission.
   Disk media diameter was initially 24 inches in diameter, but over time it has been reduced to today's 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch standard sizes. Drives with the larger 24-inch- and 14-inch-diameter media were typically mounted in standalone boxes (resembling washing machines) or large equipment rack enclosures. Individual drives often required high-current AC power due to the large motors required to spin the large disks. Drives with smaller media generally conformed to de facto standard form factors.
   Also in 1973, Control Data Corporation introduced the first of its series of SMD disk drives using conventional disk pack technology. The SMD family became the predominant disk drive in the minicomputer market into the 1980s.
  
  Smaller diameter media came into usage during the 1970s and by the end of the decade standard form factors had been established for drives using nominally 8-inch media (e.g., Shugart SA1000) and nominally 5.25-inch media (e.g., Seagate ST-506).
   CMOS technology had been primarily introduced to design digital circuits. In the last decades, in order to improve speed, power consumption, required area and other aspects of digital integrated circuits (ICs), the feature size of MOSFET transistors has shrunk (minimum channel length of transistors reduces in newer CMOS technologies). This phenomenon predicted by Gordon Moore in 1975, which is called Moore’s law, and states that in about each 2 years, the number of transistors doubles for the same silicon area of ICs. Progress in memory circuits design is an interesting example to see how process advancement have affected the required size and their performance in the last decades. In 1956, a 5 MB Hard Disk Drive (HDD) weighed over a ton, while these days having 50000 times more capacity with a weight of several tens of grams is very common.
   Industry participation peaked with about 75 active manufacturers in 1985 and then declined thereafter even though volume continued to climb: by 1989 reaching 22 million units and $23 billion in revenue.
  
  Section::::1990s.
  
  Even though there were a number of new entrants, industry participants continued to decline in total to 15 in 1999. Unit volume and industry revenue monotonically increased during the 1990s to 174 million units and $26 billion.
   In 1983, one million fixed drives with an estimated total of 90 terabytes were sold worldwide; 30MB drives had the largest market segment. In 1996, 105 million drives, totaling 160,623 terabytes were sold with 1 and 2 gigabyte drives leading the industry. By the year 2000, with 20GB drive leading the industry, rigid drives sold for the year are projected to total 2,829,288 terabytes Rigid disk drive sales to top $34 billion in 1997.
  
  According to Latanya Sweeney, there are three trends in data gathering today:
   BULLET::::- "Hardware" becomes progressively cheaper and higher-performing, according to Moore's law. Computing power doubles every two to three years while decreasing in costs. CPU processing, memory and disk storage are all subject to some variation of this law. Also hardware innovations such as multi-core architecture, NAND flash memory, parallel servers, and increased memory processing capability, in addition to software innovations such as column centric databases, compression techniques and handling aggregate tables, have all contributed to demand for in-memory products.
  
raw_presuppositions: If the physical size of devices are becoming smaller, they should not be able to increase their size in memory. For storage capacity in memory storage devices to increase, the physical size of these devices should not be able to decrease.
raw_corrections: Storing data is just storing binary, and the technology required to store these values are shrinking. Storing data is just storing binary, and the technology to store these values are shrinking.