How Big is Yours? (Hard Drive)

[Midpack]

I can't figure out why PC/Mac makers are offering such large hard drives these days. Seems that 1TB is normal these days, and 500GB is the bargain hunter size. Mine is 320GB (bought 2008), and I've managed to fill about a third of it, with no effort to manage HD space.

What on earth does everyone do with 1TB or more of space on a one-user/family personal computer?

 

[HFWR]

I can't figure out why PC/Mac makers are offering such large hard drives these days. Seems that 1TB is normal these days, and 500GB is the bargain hunter size. Mine is 320GB (bought 2008), and I've managed to fill about a third of it, with no effort to manage HD space.

What on earth does everyone do with 1TB or more of space on a one-user/family personal computer?

[-]Porn[/-] Videos, photographs, mp3...

 

[rodi]

Since we have kids - a lot of school papers and drafts. (Really need to purge previous years work.)
And photos.
And since they do robotics with USFIRST - lots of NXT mindstorm software and programs.

 

[Midpack]

Since we have kids - a lot of school papers and drafts. (Really need to purge previous years work.)
And photos.
And since they do robotics with USFIRST - lots of NXT mindstorm software and programs.

I'm curious how much space they use. I have about 2500 songs, about 20 full movies and hundreds of pictures plus all my various Office files, OS and program files and I think I total about 105GB.

 

[FIREd]

I have over 800GB worth of data. About 75% of that data consist of movies, TV series, music, photos, and video game scenery files.

 

[martyb]

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

 

[NW-Bound]

What on earth does everyone do with 1TB or more of space on a one-user/family personal computer?

Well, I have not added up, but may have a total of 7 or 8 TB, perhaps even 10TB, spread out among several PCs, a media server, one NAS server, and one Windows Home Server.

[-]Porn[/-] Videos, photographs, mp3...

Just a lot of junk 0s and 1s. Trillions of them bits!

PS. As my total storage is spread out, I do not know off-hand how many hard-disks I have right now (>10) , nor how much storage I really use.

 

[W2R]

My laptop (which I usually use instead of the desktop) has 600 GB, and I am using about 10% of that, total. Ridiculous.

I have over 800GB worth of data. About 75% of that data consist of movies, TV series, music, photos, and video game scenery files.

Oh, OK. That seems reasonable considering your files. I don't have any movies, TV series, or music. I do have all my photos on my hard drive, plus video game files but most of my PC video games are old ones with smaller files than more recent games may have.

 

[timeasterday]

What on earth does everyone do with 1TB or more of space on a one-user/family personal computer?

When photography is your hobby, and your camera is a full-frame 21mp DSLR, you need a lot of space.

Besides my 120GB SSD for the OS and programs I have:
1TB WD Black drive for photos in progress
2TB WD Green drive for photos done processing (1 year's worth)
Three 1TB external USB drives for archiving and backup

 

[audreyh1]

I can't figure out why PC/Mac makers are offering such large hard drives these days. Seems that 1TB is normal these days, and 500GB is the bargain hunter size. Mine is 320GB (bought 2008), and I've managed to fill about a third of it, with no effort to manage HD space.

What on earth does everyone do with 1TB or more of space on a one-user/family personal computer?

High dynamic range image files, panoramic image files with several layers, video files. I'm really sweating the space on my 500GB internal drive on my 2-year-old laptop, and when I get a new one, I'll really want 1TB min.

And my next camera is going to have bigger image files then my current (pretty old) one.

 

[HFWR]

Laptop has about 230G, of which 120G is used. Tower has two drives, one 150G, and a second 1T drive I bought for media work, i.e. converting vinyl and old VCR tapes, for backing up the laptop, and for my home studio hobby use.

 

[Ronstar]

320GB HD on ImaC
204GB external
2TB NAS

 

[pb4uski]

The SSD on my laptop is only 128GB, but I'm only using about half of it. I have a lot of files and pics, a little music, a few videos and no movies.

BTW, I love my SSD - it makes using my laptop so fast.

 

[ERD50]

I can't figure out why PC/Mac makers are offering such large hard drives these days. Seems that 1TB is normal these days, and 500GB is the bargain hunter size. Mine is 320GB (bought 2008), and I've managed to fill about a third of it, with no effort to manage HD space.

What on earth does everyone do with 1TB or more of space on a one-user/family personal computer?

It does seem odd to me too. Sure, some people storing a large number of hi-rez RAW photos, or many dozens of movies will 'need' it, but that seems like a small minority. Why not just let them choose to upgrade the HDD?

I keep my current music collection in lossless format on an external drive, but that is still < 100GB, and I prefer to keep it on an external anyhow. Less chance of that getting corrupted w/o an active OS running on it. And I move it from computer to computer.

Anyway, I'm using ~ 140GB out of the 320Gb internal, and I have a second full Xubuntu install on that drive. I also have a bunch of pics, a few videos, a couple ripped DVDs so I can watch on the computer, and the compressed copies of my lossless music (192kbps ogg format) - those take ~ 12GB. And a ton of email stored locally, because I'm too lazy to delete much of it.

-ERD50

 

[target2019]

When I hobbled together this old Pentium IV I now use, I put in a 500GB main drive and a 1TB secondary drive. I have in use maybe 1/3 of the storage. But i have room to grow now. One partition for photos, one for music, one for encrypted data, one for archiving downloads of programs, and one for full backups of web sites I manage.

I also have an external USB chassis for hard drives I may have to disinfect or recover.

 

[Retch The Grate]

I have 2.6 terabytes of HD space on my system of which 1.4 terabytes is in use. About 1.3 terabytes of data (music collection, video collection, movies, save files for art programs). ~100 gigs of program files.

 

[audreyh1]

I suspect that it's just that these big drives are pretty cheap now, and they don't want to lose out on those "marginal" customers that are really looking for a largish drive. Competition! Customers compare specs.

I think with the Apple laptops some of them come with a certain size drive, but you can actually opt for a smaller one and get a lower price.

 

[growing_older]

Digitized old photos and new home videos. I'm always running out of space and am very glad to see newer larger size disks whenever it's time to upgrade my computer.

 

[NW-Bound]

I forgot to say that my many TBs of storage partially came from storing duplicates of everything. But what are those? A little here and there, and these bits and bytes add up.

For example, photos took 27GB x 2, and I am just a snap-shot photo taker. The work databases I stored are possibly 200GB x 2. MP3 audio files including the ones I digitized are 160GB x 2. There are many home videos I was in the middle of editing and then forgot about. I also have a lot of work related files that I have not purged.

Hard drives are cheap, and bytes weigh nothing. At one point, about 10 years ago, back when a big HD held something like 200GB, one of my servers got 6 internal drives, and 2 or 3 USB externals. Yeah, just kept adding them on.

 

[photoguy]

What on earth does everyone do with 1TB or more of space on a one-user/family personal computer?

Decluttering and getting rid of physical stuff by digitizing everything: books, cds, photos, etc. I think we've gotten rid of the equivalent of 1000+ books, 4-500 CDs, etc.

I have 30k or so photos in my library. This would have worked out to about 1500 slide pages (= 5 filing cabinets) if I wasn't shooting digital.

 

[pb4uski]

DW has old photo albums that she never looks at. Sounds like today many people just have much bigger photo collections that they never look at.

 

[HFWR]

DW has old photo albums that she never looks at. Sounds like today many people just have much bigger photo collections that they never look at.

True for me, though I have been gradually getting rid of bad shots, near duplicates, etc.

 

[HFWR]

Just looked. On laptop, 18.9G for music, 2.2G for photos, and 6.7G for videos. In contrast, 0.4G for My Documents.

 

[RonBoyd]

On my Desktop Computer, I have a 128GB SSD with the System files and some programs that insist on being on the C: drive -- Office 2010, for instance -- taking up 91 GB. It looks like this:



The majority of my programs and data files are on Drive G: (D: & E: are CD/DVD Drives). It is a 2 TB drive and it looks like this:



Yes, that's 645 GB used. Also note that there are a number of other drives attached to this machine -- the smallest is one that is 500 GB.

 

[Walt34]

This machine is about three years old now and came with a 1TB drive and I bought a 2TB external for backup. Neither are close to being full. While I take a lot of photos, I delete many soon afterwards. Otherwise they tend to be forgotten and take up space.

I'm only using 308GB now. But then, I remember when a 100MB drive was huge and when 500MB drives came out the thought was "What would anyone do with all that?"