What limits hard drive and CPU capacity?

Question

I'm wondering. We went from hard drives that could only hold megabytes, then we went to gigabytes, now we're moving towards terabytes and soon enough something that starts with a z. So what limits harddrive capacity, why can't it hold like trillions and trillions of gigabytes for example?

Same thing about CPU, what limits (besides insufficient cooling systems) the frequency? Why can't we have like a 500000000 Ghz CPU for example?

Answer 1

the higher capacity and power, the more it defys physics

my dad told me that :)

and it becomes theoretically impossible to go too far (even though we still do it)

Answer 2

Hard drives work by writing small magnetic fields to the surface of the disk. The major limiting factor is how close you can place these field together on a disk without them interfering with each other.

Heat is a major limiting factor in CPUs, the faster they run the more heat the generate. The heat needs to be moved out of the chip fast enough so that it doesn't damage the chip. Other factors are how fast the transistors in the chip can switch from one state to another, and also how close these transistors and other components can be placed to each other.  

Answer 3

Its called technology.You expect that the first computer built should be the fastest ever made and nothing can ever be faster. For CPU speeds to get faster people have to learn how to make them faster. Different architectures are created. You can only go so fast until heat builds up then when things get get to hot to run you need to find a new architecture and add cores them run more efficient, faster, and cooler. Hard drives almost the same. You can have about unlimited space but you don want your whole room full of hard drives do you? They find out how to make them faster and smaller so its not that way. But you have to test things out to learn.