Following Moore's Law, data storage continues to get speed and capacity boosts at quite a clip--all the while coming down in cost and physical size. One business benefiting from that trend is Web storage and collaboration service Box.net. The amount of data the company once got for their money back in 2005 is now five times larger and takes up considerably less space, the company says.

As a result, Box.net this morning is putting out big changes to its offerings that give users more overall storage. Beginning with the personal plan (which is free), users now get 5GB of storage--up from 1GB. Business users get a much larger boost, going up to 500GB from 15GB. That 500GB is a pool of storage--not a per-user allotment--but it can end up being much more space for a small team than was offered before. Meanwhile, the company's enterprise plan will continue to exist without limits on how much space users take up.

Box.net now runs out of two separate data centers, as well as being tied into Amazon's S3 as part of the company's back-up systems. According to CEO and co-founder Aaron Levie, who spoke with CNET earlier this week, Box is now pushing up against a petabyte (or 1,024 terabytes) of stored user files, though that figure doesn't even include all the space used by back-ups. "There's a lot more data in our redundancies and how we store it," he said.

Meanwhile, the company is working on what Levie described as a "new crop" of open-source, distributed file systems that the company hopes will improve how much the current system can scale. The end goal is to continue to bring costs down and push out additional storage boosts like today's to Box's customers. "We're moving toward a future where storage isn't an issue," Levie said. "You should never have to worry about how much storage you use."

Today's upgrades are going out to new Box.net sign-ups right away, and existing users will get upgraded over the next few weeks.

Previously: Box.net arrives on Android devices