Storage of data is one of the biggest challenges facing IT today.  Currently Fortune 1,000 companies have on average going from 190 Terabytes to one petabyte (1 million gigabytes.)  Total data stored is about 161 exabytes .  Backing this data up is a whole different problem.   USB sticks will become much larger over time as well, and now they will become faster too.  Intel is to be the first to launch new memory called PRAM (Phase-change random access memory.)  It’s much faster than flash memory is today. 

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070307-intel-to-sample-pram-this-year.html

http://computerworld.com.my/ShowPage.aspx?pagetype=2&articleid=4486&pubid=4&issueid=107