How much hard drive space is too much hard drive space?

[_leech_]

So i'm panning in building a new system in a few months so i've been lining up parts and such, and one of the things i'm really stressing on this one is having more than adequate hard drive space because that's been a problem with the last two systems i've owned. Anyways, i have two 120GB Maxtor SATA drives and one 80GB Maxtor ATA133 drive lined up right now. The two 120GB drives i'm going to use in a RAID-0 array as my main drive while the 80GB one is going to be used primarily for backups and other important data (roms, cd/dvd images, Ghost images, school documents, etc). All-in-all, 320GB of storage, pretty adequate imho.

But i have this one friend of mine who insists that 320GB of storage is total overkill, so i beg the question: how much space is too much?

[shockwave]

totally depends on how much space you think you are going to use. If you're going to do lots of 'burning ' and copying, then yeah lots of space is good. Personally, I could never use 320 GB. I only have a 40 GB hardrive, and by the time i fill that up, i reformat and get rid of all the crap that has accumulated. I always transfer my movies to disc as soon as I get them on my PC.

Your call. If I were you, I would use what you have RIGHT NOW, then if you need more, buy more. I'd never use that much...

[ATMArage]

No such thing as too much space, especially where the stuff you mentioned is concerned. Then again, I rip every CD I buy into 320bkps mp3s, so dwindling HDD space is often a problem with me

[ShVen]

well dude... i remember... wwwaaayyyy back in the day I bought a 20gig Quantum harddrive, it cost me 250$!!!

i already had a Samsung 20gig drive, which now totaled up to 40gig...I had that up to ummm, a month ago


when they both BROKE, and i went to the store... they didnt have anything under 120gb, which would have sot 119euro


but there was something that caught my eye:

"Western Digital 200gig 8mb Cache Special Edition Drive"

for 169Euro!!!!!!!! what im tryin to say is: Disk-Space by the gig is so cheap nowadays!!!!


go for it man, if you have the spare money! its not like the space is going to go to waste, at one point, you will have:
25 games installed,
15,000 MP3's,
150 DIVX movies
1 million pr0n pics :P:P

and then youll think: thank god i listened to ShVen over at Rage3d.net 3 years ago... now i can have all this sh*t on my comp!!!! w00t w00t

[logen1869F]

well,if allu do is play games thene 320 gigs is too much, it will take you years to fill it and by thene there will be better and faster hd out. but if dl movies and stuff thene the more the better.

i personaly have only 67 gigs of space from both my hd, one is my game hd, theother is my movies.

[typoEDR]

Originally posted by _leech_
But i have this one friend of mine who insists that 320GB of storage is total overkill, so i beg the question: how much space is too much?

320GB is adequate... for your mansechs porn

[scottweil4nd]

ive seen about 4 people now with 1 Terrabyte, 4x250 WD 250s SE

[Cloud]

With the recent computer I bought.. I only bought a 80 gig. Plenty of space... I'd like to get a Scuzzy for the games though.

[jbarby]

personally I would use the space but it depends on how much space you will use. It differes for each individual. Personally for me i do not think there exists too much space. I have a 80 gig in my main pc which i recently had problems because of the drive being 100% full. I had to delete a couple things. I have a pc at my parents house a 120 gig that is 100% full. And I moved some stuff over to my parents pc about 20 gig or so. Before I left back to my apartment. A firend of mine was a lucky bastard and got a couple large drives from a friends father that worked at a hdd company. Now he has 1 terabyte of storage. I helped him fill a good portion of it But I think he sold a couple hdd's to buy something else. Anywho since all the media attention since i'm on a college line i think i may lay low a little while probably cannot stop but not downloading wildly. And my dad said no more downloading that kind of stuff at home so ahem my ftp and stuff is turned off.

[JonZ]

RIAA recommend you that 10gb hard drives are enough

[jbarby]

MPAA as well
and the BSA

[Andrew275]

I got two WD 200 GB special edition drives on sale for $100 each a couple of months ago. I have them in a RAID 0, and then an extra 80 GB drive. 480 GB =

But no, you can never have too much space. You'll fill it up eventually. I used to think I'd never fill up my 500 MB drive, years ago.

[AsDDff]

200gb here... Id ont even use it all...

[citywok]

video capture with my tv tuner eats up 3gigs an hour. space goes very quickly at that rate.

[Stoned Bob]

well if u have 320gb filled up and then drive goes broke then u losed 320gb of data

[squid]

you need LOTS of space, so you can have lots of stuff for us to leech on the DC hub

[HiThere]

Yup, nothing like doing a movie capture in uncompressed AVI format, just because you can...


Seriously though, I'd go for the reliability of the cheap DVD-R as a storage device over a massive hard drive any day, especially with 2 in Raid 0. One hard drive goes, and your data is done. A hundred-roll of DVD-R's can be had around $75, and that's 450GB not clogging up your svelt gaming setup. If it's a question of performance and you just want the Raid 0, go for it, but why the extra? Unless you're doing high-def captures or a lot of video editing, why not just spend that cash on one of the new video cards that's soon to be out? Seriously, do you let a windows install get old enough to hold all that data, and if so, what's your registry look like? Do you really need to have ALL your games installed at once? When one DVD can hold nearly a hundred hours of MP3 music, do you really need your entire collection on hard disk? What's it like backing up and re-formatting such a machine?

[TerminalEyesore]

Well, I can remember a little while back when I thought my 20 meg (yes, MEG) MFM drive was overkill. I can remember looking in a PC Shopper catalog (when they were monsterous) and seeing a 9 gig drive and thinking, "how ridiculous, no one would EVER need that", LOL. That MFM drive was a tank (and was about the same weight, and was as noisy). It never did crap out, but I finally moved on to IDE. I think my next drive after that was a 40 meg hard drive. I was really moving up in the world. It was hard to imagine using that much hard drive space (still working mostly in DOS at this time, and win 3.1, always tweaking the config.sys file and trying to get more conventional memory with QEMM). I think I moved up to a 1.2 gig and Win95 after that, and paying top dollar for it (around $200 I think, ROFL). Then 2.1 gig, then 8 gig, 20 gig, 40 gig, 80 gig, and finally, 120 gig (now). The cycle continues, and will probably never stop, as long as they can keep charging top dollar for current technology (and advance it slow enough to keep making money on it). But the rate of advancement does seem to be increasing, so don't expect your sufficient drive space to stay that way as long as it used to (if for no other reason than to feed the need to keep up with current technology).
So I guess just go with what you're comfortable with for now. That's all any of us can do in our never ending efforts to keep up in a market driven by planned obsolesence.

[logen1869F]

i wish ram would replace hd. life would be better

[logen1869F]

http://www.ircspy.com/comments.asp?mode=view&id=848

[UDHA]

40GB is enough for an office computer, a PC used for lots of gaming, music, videos etc, well you can't get enough space, not untill they tap into the infinity of the brain anyway.

[Doozer]

I currently have 200Gb on 2 pc's and most of the space is used.

My next system will have 2x200Gb drives

It depends how much you need to access on your pc and how much you download and do not need to burn to cd

[the chase]

If you use it who really cares.

80gb for my OS and games/program
30gb for my backup and Ghost images.

thats all i need, i dont get movies and Music. so i dont need that much space.

[SpiTFir3]

If i saved every single thing i dld off of kazaa i could prolly fill up a 320gb hd :P

[lmchv]

currently I have a 120GB WD SE hdd, and it's huge, I even haven't finished partitioning it

[mulciber]

i have 3x 60gb drives, a 100gb, a 120gb, and a 185gb. on two cmputers...

i also have a dvd burner cause im running out of space

[Tork64]

For me, anything over 500GB is too much but that doesnt mean i wouldnt fill it up. I currently have only 2x40 gig harddrives. They are both slow and filled to the top and i never have room left. I always end up deleting some big file and then wanting them back. Like right now for example I want Vice city and Ive had that before a few times but had to delete it because of no HD space. I still need to get a bigger hd but no money atm. 2x120 Gigs would be perfect. If I had enough space to save all the files ive downloaded i wouldnt need to redownload everything , it would of saved me a TON of time. If I had to pick the #1 bottleneck on my computer it would be my Harddrive speed and space. My CD Burner is messed up so im pretty much asked out when it comes to saving anything on my puter :\NEED MORE ROOM !!!!!!!!!

[Kombatant]

As the others have said, you can NEVER have too much free space.

[Gator]

Originally posted by ATMArage
No such thing as too much space, especially where the stuff you mentioned is concerned. Then again, I rip every CD I buy into 320bkps mp3s, so dwindling HDD space is often a problem with me

agreed! The more the better! You also need to remember that games are getting bigger and bigger these days. UT2003 takes at least 5gigs of my 120gig drive, and it grows as I download more maps & stuff. Now multiply that times the number of games you own or plan to purchase, and you're talking a lot of space. Additionally I have at least 8gigs of music, at least 8gigs of video, ? gigs of pr0n, etc etc.

So do I think 320gigs is an overkill? No. And besides, if your running RAID then it's not 320gigs, it's more like 200gigs

[Kombatant]

Originally posted by Gator
... ? gigs of pr0n,...