How Big is Yours? (Hard Drive)

[FinanceDude]

Whew! I'm glad this turned out to be about computers!!!

The hard drive thing still threw me, I thought it was another undertone thread..............

 

[Midpack]

Whew! I'm glad this turned out to be about computers!!!

The hard drive thing still threw me, I thought it was another undertone thread..............

You have to have a hook to get attention nowadays. Can't get away from marketing no matter where you turn...

 

[NW-Bound]

I would be more excited if I saw that the thread starter was a woman poster.

Hmm... But then, the verb would have been in the plural form.

 

[aaronc879]

Mine is 56GB of which I use 12GB. I've had this computer over 4 years and use it an average of approx. 10 hours/day. I can't imagine how some of you get to your data numbers.

 

[NW-Bound]

The question I have is how you manage to use so little. Out of curiosity, I just looked up the laptop I am making this post right now.

Out of the HD capacity of 446GB, the used space is 88.7GB. Is that all of my "junk"? So, I looked further, and found that the "Windows" and "Program Files" directories took up 27.7GB already.

This is a Windows 7 laptop that I bought 11 months ago, and used mostly for surfing, running Quicken, and MS Street & Trips for RV'ing, and not for "serious work" which is reserved for my big tower. OK, so I also have some photos that I downloaded from the camera, and have not deleted after uploading to my servers. There are also some pdf files that I downloaded. Oh, some youtube videos too. But how can it be that much?

Again, the question is how could you use so little, if Win 7 alone takes up 27.7GB on my laptop?

PS. I just purged the Recycle Bin, and gained a measly 0.34GB.

 

[aaronc879]

I have Windows XP not Windows 7 but I don't know how to look up how many GB that uses. All I did is click on "my computer" then click on "C" drive.

 

[Midpack]

I have Windows XP not Windows 7 but I don't know how to look up how many GB that uses. All I did is click on "my computer" then click on "C" drive.

WinXP needs a minimum of 1.5GB, but practically more like 3GB all up as I recall...

 

[imoldernu]

I don't save much any more. Have about 10 or 12 old hard drives with a lot of stuff I never used then and certainly won't use now...
Did much with photos and Corel from 1990 to 2007 so have about 80,000 jpg's, but mostly for community interest. Now almost none.
Several thousand old MP3's, maybe 100 movies MP4.
Have about 1,000 CD's and DVD's, which I'll toss.
Mostly just browse now. Five computers from 80 to 250 gig... Could handle everything I do now, with about a 10G drive.

What used to be crucial, now, not so much.

 

[RonBoyd]

I looked at my C: drive again and found that my GPS unit (Garmin) had copied the current map to the Drive. This was about 11 GB -- Garmin uses it to load the map onto the GPS Device.

Anyway, I deleted that Folder and the Drive now looks like this:



That breaks down as:

pagefile.sys - 16 GB
hiberfil.sys - 12 GB
Windows - 20.2
Users - 11.7 GB (This is mainly Application Data.)
System Volume Information - 12.3 GB (I believe this is where all of the backups to the Windows Updates are stored)
ProgramData - 1.76 GB
Program Files (x86) - 4.13 GB (Mainly Office 2010)
Program Files - 1.4 GB (This is the Common Files for Adobe 64 bit)
PowerSpec - .759 GB (The sound card drivers.)

for a total of 81.7 GB... leaving only 29.9 GB free on that 128 GB Drive.

 

[aaronc879]

WinXP is about 3GB as I recall...

I just figured out I have Windows XP Professional 2002 version. Also, 1.6 GHz and 1GB of RAM. I'm sure those numbers are really low but they're good enough for me. Sometimes I get that reload thing when i'm watching a tv show on Hulu but that's the only problem with this old computer.

 

[Karloff]

12TB (yes, twelve) in total on my mac and peripherals. 2.5TB on the PC. But I work with video and graphic design, and have tons of hi-res and uncompressed audio, so those TB's get filled up pretty quickly. I also have at least 20TBs of back-up files/drives in storage.

 

[traineeinvestor]

Currently using a lap top with a 750GB hard drive. The biggest use is photographs (which is expected to increase a lot after I retire). Hong Kong has finally emerged from the stone ages and we can buy movies/tv shows on line so that will start taking up more space (until recently you had to do a work around to get them on-line and/or rely on DVDs/Blue Ray).

I can easily see 1TB being too small at some point in the near future.

 

[FUEGO]

We have a 1TB USB drive that serves as a backup and also stores lots of multimedia content (movies, tv shows, mp3s, plus home videos and photographs). It is full and I periodically have to prune old tv shows that we will likely never watch or have already watched.

Our largest HD in our desktop computer is 500 GB, and it isn't quite full but we don't store much on there besides all the photos and home videos, plus programs and data files.

Earlier posters nailed it - marginal cost for 320 GB or 500 GB instead of 160 GB or smaller is very small. From looking at new-ish laptops lately, I don't think I saw any that had less than 320 or 250 GB in them.

The latest big thing in storage media is SSD hard drives (solid state drives). Many are now very affordable in the 128-256 GB sizes and are much faster at accessing and writing data compared to the physical disk hard drives that most computers use right now. Price per GB on the SSDs is still significantly higher than standard disk HDs, and I haven't made the plunge yet to upgrade. Possibly the next laptop I buy will come with an SSD as a default.

 

[Midpack]

I guess I need to generate and save more bytes! And it's certainly a good point that HD's are relatively cheap, indeed PC's have become cheaper than I ever imagined. So if I ever buy another PC (that's not certain), I'll probably make sure I get at least 500GB even though one of these days the cloud will probably make personal HD space unnecessary...but that's another topic, in another thread already.

 

[Texas Proud]

Main computer had 1.5T....

Have a 1T and a 500G USB drives ... one for DW and one for me...

DW had 320G on her laptop... IIRC, 64 on her IPad...

DS has 1T (or is it 750) on his laptop.... not sure..


My wife has the most data as she stores all the photos.... my USB has a lot as I backed up her USB, laptop and my computer....

 

[FIREd]

iMac: 1TB Hard drive. I only use 250GB on this one. I run Mac OS X and Windows 7 on it.

1st USB drive: 1TB. This is where I store my iTunes library (715GB)

2nd USB drive: 2TB. This is my backup drive (Time Machine).

 

[ERD50]

On the other end of the spectrum, I've got a netbook with:

4GB SSD for the system drive (2.7GB used), and a
16GB for the data drive (4.4GB used),

20GB total avail, ~ 7.1GB used. That includes ~ 1.3GB of photos, but not many other docs.

Despite this small size, it is fairly well equipped. Ubuntu 10.04 OS, and I've got a few simple games, a photo manager, scanner app, a couple browsers, Skype, TeamViewer, OpenOffice, Audacity sound editor, a music jukebox app (like iTunes), WINE ( allows some Windows programs to run), Google SketchUp (3D modeling program), plus the system and admin apps.

It runs all those pretty well.

-ERD50

 

[Sirka]

Laptop with 750GB drive

I guess I need to generate and save more bytes!

Our two grand-kids help with that. With pictures and video our collection grows at 52GB per year. Throw in a wedding and the old 320GB drive is out of space. I just got a new laptop with 750GB drive to help with storage.
I used to archive to CDs and DVDs, but found that unreliable over time, and time consuming. It's really easy to backup to 3TB USB3 drive - just let it rip - don't have to feed it blank disks. The backup drive is also small enough to keep in bug-out bag.
Windows 7 with other programs installed needs about 120GB, so that is my C: partition. (my systemdisk has grown over the years: Win95 -Win7) I also set up 15GB SwapDisk on S: to keep it out of C:. That leaves 530GB for Data on D:. Lets remember that new computers come without CDs, so they make a recovery partition, like 25GB. It all takes space and it's not a problem nowadays.

 

[David1961]

A little tangent, but my iPod currently has about 47 GB of music. It will take me over 35 days straight through to listen to all my songs. I sometimes wonder how much music is too much.

 

[Katsmeow]

I just bought a new computer.

C drive is just program is a 256GB SS drive (once you've had SS you don't want to run your programs from anything else). My D drive is 2 TB of which I have 1.14 TB free.

As you can see I could have made do with 1 TB data drive but the cost to upgrade to 2TB was very cheap and I didn't want to have to stress about having enough space. Main things that take up space are photos and videos (most videos that I bought).

I also have a 2 TB external drive that I use to backup stuff. Used to have one smaller but it wasn't big enough...

 

[Midpack]

A little tangent, but my iPod currently has about 47 GB of music. It will take me over 35 days straight through to listen to all my songs. I sometimes wonder how much music is too much.

I'm at 33GB as you may have noted in post #1. I'll never get to 47GB, good to know someone has spent more on music than I have...