What are you people filling your hard drives with??

Long ago, when hard drive space was expensive, I was really fastidious with keeping my hard drive tidy. When I bought my current desktop about 4 years ago, it came with a 500GB drive. I thought to myself, "I'll never fill this", so I got lazy about cleaning up.

Now it's 4 years later, and I've got all sorts of obsolete install files and a lot of other crap I could delete. I just checked my drive, and I find I've STILL only used 83GB.

As this machine is now 4 years old, I've been thinking about a new one. There's essentially no such thing as a computer with less than 1tb of storage.

Here's my question: what are you people using all this space for?? I mean, my computer has crap tons of documents, photos, and music, and I'm well under 100GB.

Anyhow, I think I'll wind up building my own system, just so I can get a 256GB SSD and eliminate the hard drive altogether. It just doesn't pay to buy something for which I have no use.

Pr0n

Bluray rips and lossless music.

Pirated Music

Smut.

Hungary Bill wrote: Pr0n

People download porn nowadays? Oh teh lulz, TEH LULZ I say!

Realistically though, its for people who truly use the space, it's usually video games (which can take up to 40gb per install, and with things like Steam, people own every game ever now) or video media (I have every single stage of dakar since 2005 in 720p on a harddrive. There are 14 days, which is 14 videos per year, at a gig per video).

I also have close to every rallying video produced for national, international, and world rally championships. Plus all the baja videos. Plus over 20 years of Canadian rally coverage. Plus any major hollywood release I've wanted to watch in the past decade (plus over 250 films since 1950).

I've used about 1.5tb's of storage. I doubt I'll ever get around to filling 3tb's, unless I get back into gaming. Video recording also requires huge storage, and I do a bit of that as well.

Uncompressed image files take up huge amounts of space too, especially floating point rasters and multiband aerial photography.

Funny, yesterday I ordered another 3T drive for a backup. For us, lots and lots of images.

Somewhere north of 100 games.

Hotlink thread and the G.G.A thread

Just checked mine, only using 30% of my HD. I have found using CAD with large drives is much easier.

And on a related note, will clouds ever replace the traditional hard drive?

Nope. Thin client computing's a cyclical thing, it'll wander back the other way as people demand more performance and security. Okay, maybe they won't demand the latter. Heck, just look at gaming consoles. They never used to have hard drives.

David S. Wallens wrote: And on a related note, will clouds ever replace the traditional hard drive?

Unsure.

I think there's a trust issue that'll keep clouds from completely replacing the hard drive but maybe we'll start seeing more computers with smaller hard drives whos intent will be to depend on clouds for the "extra space".

WTF is a"cloud?"

Appleseed wrote: WTF is a"cloud?"

Mine are filled with movies, tv shows, music, the usual. Also I started recording when I play some videogames. It turns out recording in 1080p ends up being a gig every 50 seconds or so. Holy crap does that fill a 2tb hard drive quickly...

My drives are full of photos. A 15 megapixel SLR that will shoot at 6 frames per second chews through storage like crazy, and that's a 5 or 6 year old camera body. The new ones are twice that.

Grumpy cat pictures

Music pictures and video. My family has decided that I'm in charge of archiving all our old film negatives and slides so I've been scanning those going on 5 years now. And we also have a bunch of 8mm films of holidays that were transferred to VHS in the 90s that are now on the hard drive.

David S. Wallens wrote: And on a related note, will clouds ever replace the traditional hard drive?

Not anytime soon. But I am planning to build one master data server for network storage of music, video, pictures, documents, etc. when we move into a new house.

Somewhere north of 25,000 photos, some thousands of songs, all 20 seasons of Top Gear + all the extras...

That's the majority of the 384GB of used space on my media drive...

What do you mean "You People"?!

Home movies, DVD and Blu-ray rips.

Gaming PC's full of games...every install is many gigs these days.

Laptop's not too full of random stuff, development-related files are a big part of it.

Phone's about 1/3 full of pictures, videos and music on top of program files and some games.

Server is full of backups of all the other computers and many terabytes of pirate treasure, arr!

I need that hard drive space for bourbon and anime.

David S. Wallens wrote: And on a related note, will clouds ever replace the traditional hard drive?

Dear Bob, I certainly HOPE NOT.