Does A Person Really Use Over 1TB Of Storage

[BonzaiDuck]

When push comes to shove, the entire family's most important, serious -- business -- files are maybe 300+ GB worth. The rest is mostly software installation archives, photos (which really doesn't take a huge amount of space,) and movies or archived DVR captures. These latter items were closer to 800 GB the last I looked.

Two things compelled me to upsize the storage: First, a driver problem with the server caused me to focus on that machine quite a bit in recent days; attempting (succeeding) in backing up our data made me aware there are only so many SATA ports, so many hard disks and so many disks of a useful size. I ordered two NAS drives of 2TB each. Not exempt from the frustration of all consumers, I got a DOA (or "died in infancy") HDD, and luckily my StableBit Drive Pool easily recovered from it.

So this week -- this month -- is probably a basketful of little computer crises, as I straighten things out and make them ship-shape. My Mom's system seems to be a bit wacky, and may need an Windows "Upgrade" Repair. Too many alligators. And with so many alligators, important to have ample, reliable, server storage and fall-back options.

 

[Raduque]

I have a roughly 7tb WHS with a little over 1.2tb free. It's mostly documents, files and digital pictures taken since my family moved to digital camera, and PC backups. I haven't even started converting the paper photos to digital yet, but I'm going to need to ugprade to WHS 2011 and 5x4tb drives when I do!

 

[smakme7757]

I currently have 750GB of photos/video and 400GB of "stuff": Purchased software (I keep a copy of everything I buy online, ISO and exe/zip), projects, documents etc.

I had a lot less before I started uni/work and got kids. But as life goes on storage requirements goes up. Although I think my 4TB storage array will hold out at least 5 years.

 

[smakme7757]

"640K ought to be enough for anybody" by Bill Gates.

Wasn't he referring to RAM?

 

[MrPickins]

It's easy to fill a 3TB disk with OTA HDTV recordings. I may have to start pruning soon...

Not to mention space used on the drive reserved for ripped discs.

Wasn't he referring to RAM?

Yes, but it's likely he never said it.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

A 1:1 copy Bluray rip is ~25GB alone, and that's only going increase when we get 4K content.

That is only single-layer BD. For instance, the Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer was a shorter running movie, but its size was larger and needed a dual-layer BD unlike the original FF movie residing on a single-layer BD.

And there are plenty of movies on DL BD.

 

[lehtv]

All hail another wonderfully thoughtless thread by our favorite forum member. :awe:

No but seriously, I started out with 1TB in late 2009. I bought additional 2TB in early 2011. IOW, I was fine with 1TB for 1,5 years. Now I've got 9TB in total, but a lot of it is for video project files yet to be created.

 

[Sword-of-Kings]

I do. I have 2 1TB hard drives that are almost full. I'm going to need to get another 1TB hard drive soon.

 

[toughtrasher]

Mostly a bunch of videos on my 1TB drive. I like to store the movies I find are funniest or just the best so I can rewatch easily

 

[Red Squirrel]

Yes.

[root@isengard ~]# df -hl
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/md0              5.4T  3.7T  1.5T  72% /volumes/raid1
/dev/md1              6.3T  4.2T  1.8T  70% /volumes/raid2
[root@isengard ~]#

I need to put in some more drives soon.

Though, a lot of that is VMs (preallocated), movies, and lot of it is also duplicated, such as backups.

I like to also archive stuff instead of deleting as it does not really cost much and I can just keep expanding the raid arrays when I need more space.

Crazy to think that my first computer had a 10GB drive, and I never imagined I could ever fill that. Then I bought a 40GB one, and thought the same thing.

 

[aigomorla]

Signs point to yes...

I've gone from 8TB to 16TB to 43TB on my NAS in the last 4 years. I'm sure I'll be expanding again within the next couple years.

HOLY COW!!

this super dimensional fortress has 43TB!!!

:thumbsup:


OP:
I am at 15TB storage for my NAS with about 6TB full...
And i have other servers with 3-4TB RAID_1 config drives for backups on backups which are half full...
so yes... people can do it quite easily...

Once u start getting paranoid about lost data and do backups for backups for backups, u tend to eat a lot of disk space.

 

[Siddhartha]

I have a 512GB SSD and a 4TB Western Digital Black. I have 212GB free on the SSD and 3.6TB free on the HDD. I thought I would need a lot of storage for my stuff, but no. Also, everyone I know who aren't gamers uses only 250GB of storage. Do we really need over 1TB?

Yes

 

[C1]

All you guys are noth'n

"The NSA will soon be able to collect 966 exabytes a year, the total of internet traffic annually." - William Binney

http://www.theguardian.com/commenti...e-goal-of-the-nsa-is-total-population-control

 

[dave_the_nerd]

My job is fun.

 

[Soundmanred]

--Living Room--
Intel (120GB) SSD - OS
Hitachi (2TB) - Docs And Programs
WD (2TB) - Games
Seagate (2TB) - Games Backup
Seagate (2TB) - TV
WD (2TB) - Movies A-M
WD (2TB) - Movies N-Z
Samsung (1.5TB) - ----'s Stuff
Hitachi (2TB) - HD Movies
Samsung (2TB) - Music
Samsung (500GB) - 3D HD Movies
WD (2TB) - Downloads And DVDs
(20.1TB / 18.62TB Usable)

--Bedroom--
1.5TB - OS
2TB - Backup
2TB - TV
(5.5TB / 5.1TB Usable)

--Backup--
Silver Seagate (500GB) ----s Stuff
Toshiba Small 1 (750GB) Music Videos/Concerts
Toshiba Small 2 (500GB) 3D HD Movies
WD Small (1TB) Music
WD Large (1TB) Games 1
WD Large (1TB) Games 2 (Emu & Wii)
Maxtor IDE (320GB) Wii Drive
WD Bare (2TB) HD Movies
Seagate Bare (1TB) Old TV 1
M1 Bare (1.5TB) Movies A-Me
M2 Bare (1.5TB) Movies Mi-Z
(11.1TB / 10.3TB Usable)

--Unused Drives--
Seagate 2.5" Bare (500GB) Unused
Seagate Barracuda Bare (500GB) Unused
Seagate Bare (360GB) Unused
Seagate PipelineHD Bare (320GB) Unused
(1.7TB / 1.56TB Usable)

38.4TB / 35.75TB Total Usable Space

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

On my main rig, no. I struggle to fill up a 500GB SSD + 1TB mechanical, although I do like to keep several 100GB of scratch space on the mechanical for vid rendering/authoring and the like.

Now my fileserver is a different story : 16x 4TB baby (about 80% utilized)

 

[ch33zw1z]

Everyone has different needs. Short answer, yes...some people need that much room.

 

[Zodiark1593]

Capturing video from my cabpe box, even at 640 x 480 still takes up a lot of space before re-encoding. Speaking of which, I've a giant backlog of tv episodes to run through Handbrake. Wish I can do it and the naking automatically.

 

[boed]

I have a 512GB SSD and a 4TB Western Digital Black. I have 212GB free on the SSD and 3.6TB free on the HDD. I thought I would need a lot of storage for my stuff, but no. Also, everyone I know who aren't gamers uses only 250GB of storage. Do we really need over 1TB?

How much a person wants is hard to say - depends on the person. I'm in the process of building a new HT server for my movies. I'm debating between making it 54TB or 64TB. I'm currently only using 14TB but I haven't converted even a third of my movies yet although most of my current TV shows are on those drives.

 

[F1shF4t]

Well just to begin 700GB+ of family videos/photos, then 4-5 backups... Yeah adds up!

 

[corkyg]

Everyone has different needs. Short answer, yes...some people need that much room.

Excellent response! OTOH, I don't fill my storage systems with movies, games, etc. Digital photos are my only storage need, and I only keep those of good enough quality to justify the effort. They are then duplicated on 4 external drives, ech no more than 500 GB.

 

[Red Squirrel]

For those of you with massive storage what kind of setup do you all have? This is mine: (24-bay one in the middle)



3 slots empty, recently added 8x 2TB drives in raid 10 but I ran into an issue with that array so it's not live yet. Oh, I don't really use the IBM ones below that. Those are "only" 400GB drives and 250GB ones. I might actually pull those out to make room for bitcoin mining rigs or something. Here is a full pic, it looks cool but those enclosures are so old and proprietary I don't feel they're worth leaving on or depending on them:





Once I get the raid 10 array working properly I'll have about 19TB or so. More than enough for my needs but if I need more I can upsize the raid 5 array to bigger drives as it's all 1TB drives right now and that array is actually what takes up the most slots.

I've actually been debating on playing around with btrfs, but I don't know if it's mature enough yet. Currently using md raid but I learned the hard way that raid 10's actually can't be expanded, only raid 5/6 it seems. There's 2 empty slots that I specifically left so I can add 2 more 3TB drives to my 4 disk raid 10, but it seems I wont be able to do that.

 

[Brian Stirling]

I have just about 1TB on my laptop and add to it at 50MB per image from my D800E's. I kept waiting for the Samsung Spinpoint M9T in 2TB to be available so I could replace the 1TB drive I had. That finally happened a couple months ago and by the time I'm looking to replace this laptop I'm hoping there will be 4TB drives in 2.5 available.

Yeah, there are one set of folks that simply can't imagine needing more than, well let's start this 30 years ago and remind ourselves that there were folks that couldn't imagine needing more than 640KB RAM. Today, the typical Win7 PC/laptop will boot up with over 1000X that just to get Windows running...


Brian

 

[Bubbleawsome]

I've used 800GB on my 1.5TB HDD after formatting about 6 months ago. It is mostly video and "data" files. Stuff like backups of my brothers minecraft saves (which use 32GB each) and general junk use a lot of it. We don't have off-HDD backups in my house, but I think we should. I'm not in control of that.

 

[StinkyPinky]

Um....1TB is pathetically low. I guess if all you do is surf the internet and play the occasional game then that's ample. But I store probably a 100 gig of photo's, 2TB or so of video, and generally have about a 1TB of games installed at any one time.

This stuff is important data to me so I backup to a 2TB external drive, and the most critical of it goes on skydrive as well. I also have another backup at my fathers house, although that's not updated on a regular basis.