Storage capacity used to be an obscure feature that interested only technophiles. But now — thanks in part to the growing popularity of digital music and video, photography and games — consumers are demanding it. And tech companies are responding:

• Samsung has unveiled a music-playing cellphone with 8 gigabytes (GB) of storage — enough to hold about 2,000 songs. The phone will be available in the second half of the year.

• Sony this month revealed that its long-delayed PlayStation 3 video game system will have 60 GB of built-in storage, enough to store about 13 DVD-quality movies. Each game disk will have an additional 50 GB — enough for games with eye-popping graphics.

• Google this month posted a presentation on its website outlining plans for an online storage service called GDrive. It would allow consumers "infinite storage" of their e-mail, Web pages and other data. Google later said the release was an accident and declined to comment further.

"Storage is no longer in the background," says independent storage analyst Tom Coughlin. "It's not just nice to have; it's a must-have."

Two different coalitions of tech and entertainment companies are developing new types of DVDs that can hold far more data than today's. They're both expected to become widely available this summer, creating a war similar to the VHS-Betamax battles of the 1980s.

Speed, not storage, once was a huge problem for tech products. But now technology has improved so much that aggravating lags — such as programs that take forever to load on a PC — are no longer the norm. That's prompted consumers to pay attention to other features, Coughlin says.

The cheaper and more plentiful storage gets, the more stuff consumers decide to store, says electronics analyst Ross Rubin at researcher NPD. In 1998, a digital music player with 32 megabytes (MB) of storage cost about $200. Today, that can buy a 2-GB player — about 64 times as big.

Digital photos and music were first, but digital video won't be far behind, Rubin says. Already, young companies such as CinemaNow and Movielink let consumers download films from the Internet. Before long, "you could have a library of movies in your car that you could show to your kids in the back seat," Rubin says.

That will force tech companies to spend more on storage in coming years, Coughlin says. Although prices are falling overall, more storage is going into each device. Already, about 50% of the manufacturing cost of a digital video recorder, such as a TiVo, is storage components, he says. "It's what people want," he says.