I can remember when we first got our first computer back when I was still in high school (386SX 16 with 2Mb RAM, 
60Mb HDD, no sound card or CD-ROM with DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.0 on 5″ disks) the biggest portable media was the good old floppy disk (1.2 and 1.4mb) games and programs would take up at most a few floppies and that was it. The original Warcraft came on 4 1.44mb floppies.
Five years later Zip and Jaz drives from Iomega were starting to appear in the shops and people were just like, “wow 100 meg / 1 GIGABYTE on single rewritable disk, this is just so cool I can put all my games, programs and utilities on one jaz
disk and still have heaps of space to spare.” This was true for a long time then CD-Rs came out and started to become more and more popular. “Here copy this on CD-R, make a CD-R of this,” sure CD-R was smaller than a Jaz disk but it became more popular so we moved onto a CD burner.
The first CD burner I got was a Panasonic CD recorder (no re-writing) SCSI 4x – woohoo. This unit burnt a 650mb CD in 20 minutes and did the job fairly well. After going though the Panasonic and then a Plextor 24x burner, USB flash drives caught my attention. While they were smaller than CD-Rs (32mb and 128mb, at the time), they were ever so portable (you could take them anywhere) they were re-writeable, just plug them in and go.
USB was great, portable and light but then DVD-R started to become attractive, 4.7Gb could be recorded in 10-15 minutes and a DVD+R DL (8.5Gb) could be done in 25 minutes or so. This too was good, but not enough, bluray burners 
are still a fraction too expensive at this stage IMHO, so what is one to do? The answer is, go back to disks. Hard disks that is.
We picked up a hard disk dock and a HDD to go in it. A 1 terabyte WD hard drive and as you can see, you insert your disk when you want to use it.
So where have we gone? We started using a (floppy) disk and have ended up using a much larger (harder) version of a big disk.
What’s next?
– David