Don't get too used to using GB's to describe hard drive sizes -- the end is in sight for desktop hard drives offering less than 1 terabyte of space. 

If you are in the market for an extreme amount of storage capacity, you can now buy 1 TB drives from either Hitachi, Seagate, or Samsung. Seagate was the first manufacturer to announce that a 1 TB HD was coming to the masses, back in January. But Hitachi quickly followed suit, announcing their first 1 TB drive only minutes after Seagate said the word "terabyte", and was the first manufacturer to actually get the 1 TB drives to the marketplace.  

And now Samsung has entered the 1 TB club with their new SpinPoint F1 desktop storage solution.

These new 1 TB drives are all selling around the $400 mark. Here is are the 3 current 1 TB offerings:

If the entire history of computing is any indication, expect all this progressively cheaper space to be filled up with balloning file sizes. The first computer with a magnetic hard drive came out 51 years ago: it was IBM's System 305. It was a massive beast, weighing about a ton, and could store a whopping 5 megabytes on 50 24-inch platters. Now a days, platter size has shrunk somewhat!