I just got a 100,000 Gigabyte Harddrive: How do I setup Email?

[Arthur Archnix]

Is it just me, or is anyone else finding the size of current hard-drives to be absurdly funny? They've just release a TB HD, but 500 and 750GB aren't uncommon. 250 is standard is seems.

Me, I've never had more than 80 and never used more than half of that.

I guess when they're so cheap you could say "why not"... but still, when you have that much space I think you tend to use it. Like memory. And CPU. And dinner plates.

I think most people with hard-drives this size are like those soccer moms at walmart driving hummers. Too many dollars and not enough sense.

[GFree678]

Is it just me, or is anyone else finding the size of current hard-drives to be absurdly funny? They've just release a TB HD, but 500 and 750GB aren't uncommon. 250 is standard is seems.

Me, I've never had more than 80 and never used more than half of that.

I guess when they're so cheap you could say "why not"... but still, when you have that much space I think you tend to use it. Like memory. And CPU. And dinner plates.

I think most people with hard-drives this size are like those soccer moms at walmart driving hummers. Too many dollars and not enough sense.

They do it because the technology is here. I remember once having a "huge" 75 MB Quantum HD for my Amiga many years ago. That seemed a little excessive at the time, but definitely not any longer.

Of course, these terabyte drives would appeal more to the leaching folk than "soccer moms" I think. I'd also think that with sizes that large, I'd really have to consider getting a second drive and sticking them in some kind of RAID configuration for protection. There's no way I'd back up that much data to DVD. :(

[blithen]

At first I thought this was a serious question >_>
Sorry...I fail T__T

[Arthur Archnix]

@blithen, =D>

[Kujen]

Apparently you've missed this whole "piracy" thing that is all the rage lately. It just so happens being a pirate takes up a lot of space.

[Arthur Archnix]

So the hard-drive manufacturers are facilitating piracy? Hmm... maybe we should add a piracy tax to hard-drives like we already do with blank cd's and dvd's.

[amazingtaters]

Well, if you are using your computer as a media centre, or you have a lot of music and video files or whatever, it's a serious need. I've filled something like 130 to 140 gigs of space on my XP machine, most of it being images, since I used to do a lot of various stuff with photoshop, music (7+ days of continuous playback again requires some space), and pretty much every dvd I own, ripped to the hard drive so I could watch them whenever without finding the disc. So I'd say it's plausible to use that much space. Is a terabyte a bit ridiculous, sure is.

[Frak]

If you run a server, large harddrives are a gift from god. Especially if you plan on supporting an increasing data accumulation in the long run.
Other than that, I've never used more than 120GB before.

[RomeReactor]

My first system (some 7 years ago) had a 4 GB HD, then I got a 40 GB, then replaced that with my current 80 GB HD. My "newest" acquisition is an IBM Aptiva one of my relatives gave to me, featuring a whopping 1 (yes, one) GB HD.

I've recently started downloading old movies from Public Domain Torrents (http://www.publicdomaintorrents.com/), and the 80 GB HD is starting to look rather small from this side of the screen...

[DarkDancer]

Man, wish I had a couple of Terrabyte drives.

[FuturePilot]

Lol yeah. I have an external 160GB drive and I still have about 140GB free. :p

[ThinkBuntu]

80GB on my ThinkPad...60GB on my MacBook...80GB on my iPod...30 or so scattered between USB thumbdrives and other iPods.

More than enough for me!

[popch]

Is it just me.

Yes.

There are others who are powerfully glad to have disks of that size. Others need more processing power, still others lightweight computers.

Vive la difference.

[GFree678]

Something I've always wanted to know...

Would a 1TB drive be more fragile/prone to failure than, say, a 200GB drive?

[popch]

Something I've always wanted to know...

Would a 1TB drive be more fragile/prone to failure than, say, a 200GB drive?

No, but once it fails you lose more data.

[DjBones]

100,000 GB

thats alot of movies lol

[Arthur Archnix]

Well, yeah, I get that. But maybe the subject line would have given you the clue that I'm mocking selling that kind of hardware, standard, to mom and pop wanting to make christmas cards and organize photos.

I know, I know, the old story about gates saying something like, "who'd need more than 612kb of memory" or some such, my only point is that the more space we have... generally speaking... the most wasteful we become with it.

So, in five years will compression be seen as obsolete? Will we store 5 hour home videos, just because we can?

I'm not trying to be philosophical here. I'm just pointing out that of the thirty or so computers I restore or repair or upgrade a year, I rarely have to back up more than 1 DVD of data before doing a clean reinstall. The fact that these users have 200Gig+ of space is... funny. To me.

But hey, vive la differance, right?

[Arthur Archnix]

100,000 GB

thats alot of movies lol

Actually, I hadn't even done the math. I was trying to be really absurd with the number, but that's got to be only what, 90 Terabytes? Maybe 95? I wonder how many years away we are from Dell selling a 100 Terabyte system? Or M$ Ultimatadoozy 2014 requiring 2 Terabytes for the install? (1.5TB for ulatimapoorass of course).

:)

[Arthur Archnix]

My first system (some 7 years ago) had a 4 GB HD, then I got a 40 GB, then replaced that with my current 80 GB HD. My "newest" acquisition is an IBM Aptiva one of my relatives gave to me, featuring a whopping 1 (yes, one) GB HD.

Wow... what's running on that 1Gig Monster? I'd probably use it as a swap file. :)

[use a name]

You could stuff it with linux distro's (yes, and bsd...). Would make a nice boot menu. :D (Hmmm... If that doesn't give problems with partitioning... Hmmm...)

[Arthur Archnix]

You could stuff it with linux distro's (yes, and bsd...). Would make a nice boot menu. :D (Hmmm... If that doesn't give problems with partitioning... Hmmm...)

How cool would that be... if you walked into future shop, or best buy and got a boot menu of like 45 different OS's (Windows, Mac, RHEL and such would be 30 day trials) and then could choose to keep some or all, or pay an extra $200 or so for Mac or Win? Now that would be a good use of space!

[RomeReactor]

Wow... what's running on that 1Gig Monster? I'd probably use it as a swap file. :)

Actually, Puppy! And at a surprisingly decent speed. :popcorn:

[happy-and-lost]

People who rip hundreds of CDs at >320kps, rip their entire DVD collection and install hundreds of programs they never use can easily fill up a few TB of space.

Personally, my 60GB hard drive seems to be more than I'll ever need :)

[AlbinoButt]

I guess it depends on what you do with your computer. Nowadays there are many High Definition consumer camcorders you can buy that record beautiful looking video. Even compressed, this can take up tons of space.

Then you have people who have large CD libraries that they would like to put on their computer with lossless compression like FLAC.

And finally, you have people with computers that act as DVRs and media servers. They can easily fill up a 500 GB hard drive.

If you just use your computer for things like email (like you said jokingly, Arthur), then you obviously don't need that much space. For people who use their computer for lots of multimedia applications, the more space, the better.

[Arthur Archnix]

EDIT: New sig test failed :(

[roderikk]

My first system (some 7 years ago) had a 4 GB HD, then I got a 40 GB, then replaced that with my current 80 GB HD. My "newest" acquisition is an IBM Aptiva one of my relatives gave to me, featuring a whopping 1 (yes, one) GB HD.

I've recently started downloading old movies from Public Domain Torrents (http://www.publicdomaintorrents.com/), and the 80 GB HD is starting to look rather small from this side of the screen...
When I was just a little kid our first computer had a 20mb harddrive... Then my dad got a new one with 40mb... that was so much! I remember working with floppy disks (you know that little icon you click to save documents). And I remember the stories from my 'predecessors' of working only with floppies... in other words without a harddrive... I have even heard stories about cards with holes in them...

Time is sure flying...

[popch]

When I was just a little kid our first computer had a 20mb harddrive... Then my dad got a new one with 40mb... that was so much! I remember working with floppy disks (you know that little icon you click to save documents). And I remember the stories from my 'predecessors' of working only with floppies... in other words without a harddrive... I have even heard stories about cards with holes in them...

Time is sure flying...

Not to forget the audio cassette recorders as used by Apple, Commodore PET and Radio Shack.

[anaconda]

So the hard-drive manufacturers are facilitating piracy? Hmm... maybe we should add a piracy tax to hard-drives like we already do with blank cd's and dvd's.

Yea. We already have that! And it is a really unfair idea.. like al of us would be pirates..

[samjh]

Hard drives eventually fail. They are the most failure-prone devices on a personal computer (lots of moving parts and very small fault tolerance). If your hard drive is more than 3 years old, you should probably replace it with a new one.

Three years from now, a 250 GB hard drive might not be commonly available, and a 1 TB hard drive would probably be better value for money anyway.

[@trophy]

I think most people with hard-drives this size are like those soccer moms at walmart driving hummers. Too many dollars and not enough sense.


Or photographers like me, who have 3 years worth of RAW pictures, their JPG variants, and photoshops of the above to store in addition to my 50GB of music.

I have a 250GB storage drive and a 120GB main drive that's split between XP and Ubuntu.

[insane_alien]

i ripped every CD/DVD/software/backup disc to my 1.5TB RAID 5 array, just so i can use them anywhere around the house and even use the same one in several different places at the same time.

so much ore convienient and i still have oodles of space. i'll use it up eventually as i've taken a liking to making short movies and bought myself one of those HiDef HDD digital video cameras. that's going to fill it up fast.

[BDNiner]

If you are into audio or video production you will fill that space up very quickly. Especially since you are working with uncompressed files.

[popch]

Or photographers like me, who have 3 years worth of RAW pictures, their JPG variants, and photoshops of the above to store.

You do have backups, don't you?

[@trophy]

You do have backups, don't you?

I did until I ran out of room for making backups... as soon as I can afford another drive I'll have backups again. For now the important stuff is burned to CD/DVD and that's the only backups I had. If my hard drives both died tonight I would be a very sad penguin.

[Tuna-Fish]

It's called a digital tv decoder. 1TB isn't all that much when you start using it for watching TV series.

[Depressed Man]

I use to think 300 GBs was big..

That was before I started taking pictures (each one is like 1-3 MBs due to the size and quality lol) and video with my Canon. Not to mention using my computer at college to record the TV shows I miss due to other events. Oh and backups.

[mech7]

HHD is like your attic no matter how big it is, it will always be stuffed full with crap :)

[Depressed Man]

Haha how true. I really should just go through my computer one day and start deleting stuff I no longer have a use for. But I'm afraid things on the computer are like my room in real life. I only start dealing with the mess once its problematic.

Indexable searching only made the problem worse seeing as now I don't even have to make an effort to put things in proper folders.

[aks44]

When I was just a little kid our first computer had a 20mb harddrive...
Indeed, my first HD was a 20mb one. All of a sudden you could store the amazing amount of about 27 3.5" 720k floppies!! And the access times were sooo fast compared to floppies or tapes... :D

This almost removed the need to format floppies past track 80 in order to gain a whopping 9kb per additional track... (even though it made your floppy drive die in horrible noises, it was a must have...)


Time is sure flying...

Sure it is. ;)

[ErikTheRed]

It's definitely useful to have the extra space when you like ripping all of your music in flac format. Once I stop being so lazy I also want to rip my dvds using x264.

[gnuman]

....I think most people with hard-drives this size are like those soccer moms at walmart driving hummers. Too many dollars and not enough sense.

I'm sure that happens. I'm a teacher and although I have a 30 Gb Ipod stuffed full of music, the typical student in my school with a 30 Gb model has only 1 or 2 gigs worth of media on there. They just have no clue how much would fit on there....no concept. As if they'd say "Megabytes, Gigabytes...whatever!"

[Depressed Man]

I agree. I still haven't bought a huge GB sized mp3 player for that reason. While computers I can justify it from my own use (as I've seen). I really can't imagine listening to all the music I have. I don't even listen to most of the songs on my 2 GB mp3 player right now lol.

[Dimitriid]

I think is the way things work. Technology pushes forward, the desktop and laptop consumer market is getting frightfully powerful in a very short time, terabyte hard drives and quad core processors on 2-4gb of ram and 1gb just for video is not uncommon, yet many people are still just using 32 bit OSes and just a handful of applications are taking true advantage of more than 1 core, etc.

It will eventually come, if you think about it nobody ( except Microsoft ) wants to produce software that is too intensive for current hardware so this is natural. Something to look forward to, good opportunities for Linux too ( i.e. 64bit support for consumer seems to be much more mature on Linux which is traditionally seen as slower to support new hardware specifications, :D )

[goumples]

Heh, on my media center box I managed to fill up its 500gb HD in the space of a month.. so i bought a 2nd hd and set it up... filled it up.. finally just took the time on my day off and backed it all up to dvd.. god that was painful.

[popch]

nobody wants to produce software that is too intensive for current hardware

Sounds plausible but is not true.

Examples of companies that produced software which used more power and/or capacity than was available on consumer's devices, and some products:

Apple (Newton OS)
Smalltalk (don't know who published that first)
Adobe (Photoshop)
Corel (Draw)
Star/Sun/ (OpenOffice)
Calgari (TrueSpace) as well as most renderers
Flight Simulator
Ah yes, and MicroSoft with Windows, Office and possibly some others.

The list is endless. In almost every case (of those mentioned here) the hardware eventually caught up with demand. However, by that time a new version again pushed the limits of available hardware.

[Blindraven]

Is it just me, or is anyone else finding the size of
I think most people with hard-drives this size are like those soccer moms at walmart driving hummers. Too many dollars and not enough sense.

Yes, thats right, I have large capacity drives because I am stupid.
Of course.

[Arthur Archnix]

I just installed adobe reader 8 on my windows partition, and it was 80+MB. :shock:

If hard-drive space weren't so cheap and readily available, Adobe would have had to actually think about what it wanted it's program to do (presumably, read pdf files), and then code accordingly.

Oh and I'm convinced by the thread, I see that more and more people are using their comps as media centres, and that the space isn't absurd at all. I should stop thinking my grandpa is a representative sample. ;)

[popch]

I should stop thinking my grandpa is a representative sample. ;)

But he is. What we should stop thinking is that the population of computer users was homogenous.

[Arthur Archnix]

Just in the context of this thread. I mean, I found the size of hard-drives hilarious, and sure it may be absurd in the context of 50% of average users (that number was found by using scientific instruments and methods to extricate it from my ***), but the reality is that with computers moving into the realm of multimedia servers and the content and quality of those files requires incredible amount of space.

Hell, the fact that my grandpa has a celeron 2.6 and 256MB of ram to read his email is absurd.

EDIT: :oops: just learned that curse words like "behind" are replaced by ***, sorry forums!

[EdThaSlayer]

Just imagine not having to delete anything on your hard drive(even the redundant files), wouldn't that be great?Now, only to create a very fast search program...

[chimp_rex]

...Too many dollars and not enough sense.

Wanna donate? I run a foundation. :)

[keyboardashtray]

While I'm sure plenty of people have no trouble filling 300 mb, I think the real reason the number keeps climbing is it is a cheap and easy stat to impress the not as tech savvy with.

Have you noticed how prominently places like Best Buy display the hard drive storage on the stickers/flip books, while sometimes such an important stat as the processor isn't even listed on some display models?

[julian67]

Is it just me, or is anyone else finding the size of current hard-drives to be absurdly funny? They've just release a TB HD, but 500 and 750GB aren't uncommon. 250 is standard is seems.

Me, I've never had more than 80 and never used more than half of that.

I guess when they're so cheap you could say "why not"... but still, when you have that much space I think you tend to use it. Like memory. And CPU. And dinner plates.

I think most people with hard-drives this size are like those soccer moms at walmart driving hummers. Too many dollars and not enough sense.

If you are sane enough to implement a back up regime you need a lot of extra space. If you have a digital camera with high pixel count and take a lot of photos you need a lot of storage. If you have scanned/digitised a large collection of negatives or transparencies you will need a huge amount of space (a 35mm negative scanned at highest quality on a professional standard scanner will be 50 - 60 MB per shot). Most professional and hobbyist photographers will have a system of archiving and backing up their valuable work. If you back up your CDs you need a lot of storage. Some people will have CD collection that has been growing for over 20 years and a DVD collection for over 10 years. If you edit or transcode video you need a lot of free space available. If you run virtual machines you need a lot of extra capacity. There are numerous valid reasons why people might need hundreds or even thousands of gigabytes of drive space.

You are only you and thankfully we are all different.

[Arthur Archnix]

If you are sane enough to implement a back up regime you need a lot of extra space.

You are only you and thankfully we are all different.

Well, if you'd read the whole thread you'd have realized that I too realize there are legitimate reasons for needing loads of space. And thanks to all the helpful posts that there are many more people out there than I at first thought that can use such massive space.

But reading is hard. And takes time. Unfortunately, I'm a user on laptop and need to backup to DVD's, but I'm sure your "sane" backup implementation is RAID. ;)

Oh and this:

You are only you and thankfully we are all different.
I'm just going to assume you were being ironic.

[julian67]

Unfortunately, I'm a user on laptop and need to backup to DVD's, but I'm sure your "sane" backup implementation is RAID. ;)

Oh and this:

I'm just going to assume you were being ironic.

For the last 2 years I've used only laptops (not through preference but due to frequent travelling and space constraints). My backup regime is based on clonezilla live (these days by using clonezilla-gparted live CD) and external hard drives. I also frequently back up DVDs. No irony intended.

[jpross81]

for anyone who might have been misled... 1TB = 1000GB not 100,000GB
100,000GB = 100TB http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_GIGABYTES_IN_A_TERABYTE

[Salpiche]

how do you back up a 1 TB drive?, what would be better to use 250 DVDs, 1400 CDs, or should I use a couple 500GB HDs on an external enclosure.

:lolflag:

[DarkDancer]

Salpiche,

You use 12 double density bluray discs.

[hessiess]

ive got a 110 gb hd and my /home folder is about 4 gigabytes!

[Salpiche]

yeah I forgot about them..
LOL

[kingof1981]

i running my system
on four different harddrives

1. is the smallest and oldest one with only 13.8 Gb space
i use this disk to backup my currently running system,
and some stuff i maybe need sometimes...
2.and two 80 Gb drive's (different types)
3.is a 500 Gb drive which my system is running on
this disk is pretty fast up to 280 MB/s possible
4.cd/dvd burner

and i have two slot's free...:guitar:

[popch]

In reply to the OP:

Use your 100TB disk for the SWAP partition.

[forrestcupp]

My first computer after my Commodore was a Packard Bell with a 540 MB harddrive. I tried using Drive Space to double the storage and it slowed my system down to a crawl.

[Lucifiel]

My total amount of hard disk space (inclusive of external hdd): 650 gb.

I've around 150 gb to 200 gb currently unused but it's all filling up rather quickly.

[popch]

I tried using Drive Space to double the storage and it slowed my system down to a crawl.

You should have used Stacker. Worked like a charm and without any noticeable loss in speed. It came with a t-shirt which had a blowfish printed on it. My son wore it until last summer. His girl friend then threw it away over his protest because there were more holes than anything else.

[rolnics]

My first computer after my Commodore was a Packard Bell with a 540 MB harddrive. I tried using Drive Space to double the storage and it slowed my system down to a crawl.

Wow! Those were the days . . . Commodore 64! I never did get the floppy drive for that, and never got round to the Amiga either (damn) The first PC we had was a speed demon . . . 386sx25 4mb ram and about 40mg hd!

But yeah i do see ya point, my last 2pc's had 40gb hd's, but then cos i wanted to get back to my music and wanted the extra space to have 2 window setups and loads of space for all the music and editing i was going to do i got 120gb as well. Needless to say at present if i have about 60gb filled, if that! lol