A survey released by the company reveals the average British adult has over £600 worth of photos, music , movies and games stored on their MP3 players, phones, laptops and other portable gadgets.

On average, consumers store 502 songs, 466 photos, 14 films and eight game, according to the survey of more than 2,000 adults

“The digital storage needs of the nation indicate that Britain is now entering what Hitachi dubs the Tera Era, where the amount of digital information created, captured and duplicated around the world continues to grow at an uninterrupted, unrelenting pace,” the research said.

Nick Kyriacou, director of EMEA at Hitachi GST, said storage needs would continue to rise.

“Just over 20 years ago, people thought five megabytes was more than enough, but that’s only enough space for one or two songs today,” he said.

“As consumers have demanded more, the technology has enabled terabyte hard drives that allow consumers to store and carry large amounts of data, including high-definition video.”

Kyriacou estimated that the average value of stored content has gone up almost 50 percent over the last three years and is continually increasing.

Other companies clearly agree that storage needs to increase, with Sony increasing the size of its Memory Stick Micro cards to 8GB this week and a 16GB phone available from Nokia for some time.