Why would someone need a 250GB hard drive?

[bluestateguy]

I can't understand it. The desktops that are out now are up to 250GB of disk space. I can't figure out why this is necessary. My machine has 160GB, I have almost 2000 video and audio files on it, and I still have 85% of my hard drive free. Why would someone need 250GB?

[Nevernose]

1. Porno?

Although my home movies -- none of which are porographic -- take up a lot of space when digitising them.

[iconoclastic cat]

15. Yeah, it's most likely porn.

Hell, I have a recording studio on a 40G, and it's only half full.

[Fenris]

2. To play DOOM 3?

[Occulus]

6. ROFL

And have you upgraded yet for that?

As I understand it, systems with relatively low specs will be able to play the game. Imagine that!

[Bat Boy]

3. I remember saying that about my 540k hard drive.

What was that....three, four years ago?

[Occulus]

8. The '640K barrier'

was there because the architects of the hardware at IBM thought nobody would ever need more than that... so sayeth the tech urban legends.

[TrogL]

20. It's not an urban legend

Hell, I was there.

Given what was going on at the time, 640K was a ridiculous amount of memory.

Then video cards came along. Then some fool came out with a processor faster than 4.77 Mhz.

The rest is history.

My aching head. I've got a server with 8 Gb of memory and they managed to bury it in swap. It's got a terra byte of disk and they're already whining.

[sandnsea]

9. My 1 Gb

What in the world am I going to do with all that space!!! lol

[Occulus]

11. just wait until

we're measuring memory in gigabytes and storage in terabytes or petabytes.

Now will look sad by comparison.

[realisticphish]

32. whoa

you're entering geekgasm tarritory, there

a friend of mine's dad works with a hacker-monitoring gov't office, and he has fiber optic lines that run terabytes per second...


:hippie: The Incorrigible Democrat

[htuttle]

4. Raw DV format video, like from DV cameras

It takes up about 11-12 GB per hour of video. It fills drives up fast. Very fast.

[Occulus]

5. For if they're using

a 3D modeling application like Maya, 3D Studio Max, Lightwave, etc. All these generate (sometimes, large) images which are sequenced together into a movie file or part thereof. There can be thousands of such images per project.

That's one reason I can think of off the top of my head.

[MyshkinCommaPrince]

21. That's my answer, too.

The 3D files can be quite large, too.

[TrogL]

7. mpegs

mp3's
video
the complete works of beethoven

[Wonk]

10. I have a 250GB external firewire drive.

I bought it because it has enough space that I can backup all the important stuff from all three of my computers at once. Actually, I had a particular need, where I wanted to backup my entire 80 gig internal and repartition it and do a clean install of Panther, then reinstall all the other stuff I'd backed up. I figured I may as well get a little extra space to spare, so I could use it for the same purpose again with my as yet un-bought next computer, too.

Quite handy to have around, in my experience.

[Occulus]

13. Panther? nt

[Wonk]

14. Panther. Since I can, I'll probably do a completely clean install of Tiger

too, once it's out.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/

[Occulus]

17. Ah. Can't run it.

Don't have a Mac.

I do run linux, though. :)

[realisticphish]

33. a friend of mine

is a manager at a Mac store, tee hee. Panther was free for me, and im sure tiger will be too

:hippie: The Incorrigible Democrat

[kiahzero]

12. MythTV box

Feel the TiVoy goodness.

[NightTrain]

16. MP3s, baby!

If you're even half as big a musichead as I am, you could fill up a 250GB hard drive with MP3s in no time!

[Nevernose]

24. No shit?

I've got about 10-12 gigs, and I thought I was overdoing it. That's a LOT of digitised music.

[huellewig]

27. I got a good stereo..

And had to re-rip my music to Apple Lossless. MP3/AAC was great for headphones (and iPod) but isn't so great for a good system.

http://www.apple.com/itunes/import.html

That eats up a hard drive real fast. I had about 60 Gigs of MP3's ripped at 192kbs. And when we toss porn in the mix I can't have enough storage.

[Downtown Hound]

18. Video is the real reason

As DV gets more popular and computers become more of a "digital hub" encompassing music, movies, and photography in addition to standard computer fare, people will need a lot more disk space to hold all of it. Believe me, I used to make commercials for a living, and I struggled with 180 GB of hard disk space. Video takes up a lot of memory.

[RoyGBiv]

19. Not a direct answer...

Others have given better answers, the one about DOOM 3 probably being the most accurate. :-)

I'm planning on getting a 250 gig external for backups and easy transport of data. A few years ago, something like a ZIP drive worked fairly well for this, and CD's or DVD's can serve certain backup and transport needs. But, I've done this kind of thing so often, I've decided I want an easier solution that doesn't take half the day to prepare. Keeping a full backup, including the exact tree structure, of my drives in one place that can be quickly connected via a USB cable to pretty much any computer I'm using would be heaven.

OnEdit: Now that I think about it, I can think of another reason for me personally. I'm a packrat and like to keep archives. At one time, I had two years worth of the Usenet groups I frequent archived, including all my posts. These are just text groups and don't take up a ton of space individually, but over time, and with several of them, the size of that directory got to be enormous. I eventually had to stop keeping such an extensive archive so I would have room for mpgs, games, video, etc.

[dolo amber]

22. Mmmmm......disc space....

[InkAddict]

23. So they don't have to use those

troublesome IDLAFs (pronounced I'd laughs),it wasn't so distracting(Incredible Disappearing Los Alamos Floppies).

[Devils Advocate NZ]

25. Easy - many games require lots of space.

Take for example Battlefield 1942 - By itself it takes around a gigabyte of space. Install all the mods as well, and you are looking at seven or eight gigabytes. For ONE game and its mods.

Now take a few dozen games such as this, MP3's, video, and other sundry applications, and 250 gigabytes is not that much.

[Gothic Sponge]

26. I have 3 hard drives on one of my computers

2 internal 200GB drives, and one 180GB external drive. I need the space for my vast porn collection! Just kidding! I do music production on that machine and i need lots of hard drive space.

[jmowreader]

28. Pro artists need this much space

When I was still in the pro-graphics business, I had dual 120GB hard drives and they were usually both full.

A magazine-quality CMYK scan off a high-end scanner needs about 1MB per square inch, and I always scanned big--150 to 200 percent of the size I "thought" I was gonna need, because one out of every three print jobs you will ever do will come back "take this photo, this one and this one and blow 'em up 200 percent because the little thing right there, the object you can barely see, is what we're selling." When the picture's already 8.5 x 11 with bleeds (meaning the file needs to be AT LEAST 8.75 x 11.25), shit gets huge quick.

Because you're gonna ask: at 150 percent, a full-bleed, full-page photo is about 75MB.

I remember one brochure for an Alzheimer's hospital. The cover was a wrap-around image and weighed in at 150MB. There were eight full-page images at 75MB each. The whole book was full of silhouetted, feathered-edge images that faded into a background color--it took me four days to set that up. By the time I was done, we had over 15GB of data. At the time the biggest machine we had contained a 4GB hard drive, and the boss was too cheap to buy the two 9GB drives (that's all we could get at the time; they were in the thousands-of-dollars range) we needed to finish the job; to compensate for this we had to build one two-page printer's spread, write it to film (a full-day's undertaking), archive the images on that spread to three tapes (one stayed at the shop, one went in my briefcase, one went to the boss's house), throw the Photoshop files away and start on the next spread.

The guy I know who does business video has two 250GB drives on his nonlinear editing workstation and they're always full--two projects will fill both drives, and he generally likes to keep six or seven projects going at once. (He compensates for this problem by using a FireWire-based external drive chassis that I hinged the top of for him. When he works on a project, he flips up the lid, installs the drive for that project, and he's ready.) He is buying a Power Mac G5 with the fiber channel card and an Xserve RAID system; you can load eight 250GB drives into that, so that should take care of the problem. We plan to get sixteen 250GB drives and name them A1 through A8 and B1 through B8. If the jobs in progress are on the A drives, he'll just shut off the RAID, put the A drives into it in order, and light off the unit. All will be well.

For most of y'all, a 250GB drive is a "I have it because I want the biggest" purchase. The normal person, or me right now, would never fill one.

[Deja Q]

29. Video processing... Now consider this and feel ashamed:

Video takes up 15GB per HOUR, uncompressed format.

It adds up quickly.

Now consider this: That dual-G5 Apple Macintosh for $3000 comes with 512MB RAM, a puny Radeon 9600 video card w/128MB RAM, and 160GB hard drive. Macs for video processing? (They currently have a sale, extra 512MB free, normally that isn't the case. So where is Al Gore in this company trying to help out his consumer base, huh? Is Apple immune to the middle class? x( I can build a dual-Athlon PC for half the price, get 1GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce 6800 w/256MB RAM, and 250GB hard drive that would knock the socks off this Mac in overall performance (and price/performance ratio): http://www.macmall.com/macmall/shop/detail.asp?dpno=448986 Oh, MacWorld is really shoveling up the hype for "superior tools" and of course a 2 CPU SMP system will outperform a single CPU system, DUH...)


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[xultar]

30. I develop systems training including web based graphic-intensive stuff

stuff.

Along with procedure and test scripts.

I need that much.

[alarimer]

31. My new computer

An HP, came with a 160 GB hard drive. It seems like a lot to me because I am not into videos or MP3s. Most of the other ones I looked at had 80GB hard drives.