Does A Person Really Use Over 1TB Of Storage

[NewYorksFinest]

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?

 

[ignatzatsonic]

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?

Who is "we"?

I have no idea who you know. I don't play games on a computer. I have about 560 GB of data files.

It looks like you may have bought a 4 TB drive without needing it. Not sure why you did that.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

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?

It seems that every year or so, the makers of electro-mechanical drives produce new models with greater capacity. In fact, this also generally applies to include SSDs.

I've always been a bit reticent to increase my available storage with devices of higher capacity when the storage I have seems ample.

On the other hand, I personally think one is better off with a storage device filled to about half capacity than with a device at 70% or 80%. I remember the old days when you could fill up a disk to the point where Windows couldn't function properly. Perhaps it couldn't find enough space for a page file -- any number of things.

I'm also posting here in threads about my WHS 2011 home server. It uses a drive pool of four disks -- 1TB each. It's more capacity than I need at the moment. But I can envision a situation where I might fill the pool with DVR archives or audio recordings as the collection grows. I just think I have a long way to go with this.

The problem with higher-capacity storage is that one must also make provision for backup devices sufficient for the files or categories of files determined to be of higher priority for backup. I currently am using about 1.3TB out of my 3.6TB drive pool on the server. To back up my most important files, I need a 500GB drive -- and as expressed in another thread I started here -- I currently have to back up those files and folders effectively twice, since they're duplicated folders in the pool and there's not an easy way to determine which disks hold a single copy of the entire collection of those files. Until Cove-Cube -- developers of StableBit Drive Pool -- can fix their program to allow other backup programs like Acronis to access the pool successfully, the individual pool members need to be backed up.

But that's the essence of the problem. You want enough storage space for current and future needs. You also want some sort of internal or external device which is sufficient for backup. How will you back up? You might take disk images; you might clone a hard disk to another hard disk; you might simply do a "COPY" or "XCOPY" of files from folders on one disk to folders on the backup disk.

The problem doesn't change when the focus is HDDs or SSDs. Your largest-capacity option is an HDD. But Samsung EVO SSDs come in a 1TB model. For me, I could "almost" get by with a 240 or 256GB boot drive, but that's cutting it close. My ISRT-leveraged 600GB HDD will probably have 50% unused capacity two years from now.


Unless it's a matter of speed (SSD) versus capacity (HDD), HDD prices are so low as to make the issue of "buying too much" sort of trivial. And there are at least a couple ways to leverage SSD speed while much of the storage location is on the HDD. With current SSD prices, users need to decide for themselves whether they really need a 500GB or 1TB SSD for anywhere between $300 and $500. Those prices are coming down. But so are the prices on 250GB models. I noticed just today that you can get a 240GB SSD for maybe $120 -- as long as it's not a Samsung or Intel model.

 

[lamedude]

If digital hoarders was a show I would be on it. Easier to buy another HDD than to find what is expendable in my pr0n stash.

 

[BFG10K]

Do we really need over 1TB?

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

 

[AViking]

It's easier to just buy a new hard drive than sit there and sort through stuff.

I have actually been trying to sort through stuff these last couple months and it's very boring. The shit I find though. I had a VCD on my drive from 15 years ago. Back then resolutions were for CRT TV's at something like 320x200 or something awful. Even if the content is great it's not worth watching. If I convert it to B/W I feel like I'm watching a family movie from 1900.

My digital photos take up around 600GB though. That alone is a reason to have at least a 1TB drive.

 

[Tristor]

My media/storage server is about 2/3rds full with 32TB of total usable capacity. The rest of my systems are SSD-only and use network storage for anything large. I don't know about you, but as far as I am concerned there's no such thing as "too much" storage capacity.

 

[Blain]

Does A Person Really Use Over 1TB Of Storage?

yes

 

[dave_the_nerd]

yes

Agreed.

Hell, I have over a TB of backups.

And crashplan is nice enough to back up my backups for me, too!

Well, it's very unlikely, but... in a crunch I wouldn't want to be caught without a second backup.

Everything I know about being a sysadmin I learned from the Chief.

 

[pauldun170]

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?

Currently I have about 1TB of movies and TV shows for the HTPC, 500GB of Music, and about 500GB of pics covering 16 years of memories.
I also maintain all my ISO's, frequently used install files, and backups.

 

[KingFatty]

A good question might be, why aren't you taking more photos and videos? Also, why are you just trusting them to the cloud, and not keeping your own copy of them as your own property that won't be exploited for profit?

If you do these things, you will need more storage, and storage is cheap. No need to resize all your gorgeous pictures down to 640x480 resolution to try to save space.

Oh yeah, also, if you still can't figure out how to fill up 1 TB of space, you should definitely have a kid or two, and buy a DSLR camera that can take 1080p video.

 

[Essence_of_War]

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?

This is a pretty strange train of thought to me. You picked your storage components completely divorced from what your actual storage needs were? Then your response to noticing that you've overspec'd is to question if anybody needs the amount of storage you bought?

If no one needed several TB of storage, you probably wouldn't be able to get large capacity spinning disks. Since 2,3,4 (and now 5 and 6!) TB HDDs are on the market, and priced fairly competitively (that is to say, they don't diverge in price/TB the way high-end GPUs like the Titan do in price/perf) you might immediately guess that SOMEONE is buying them because they are filling a need that 1 TB and smaller drives are not meeting.

But let's be more concrete. If you're a gamer, consider Bioshock Infinite, a year-old, fairly demanding title. Requires ~30GB of space. The first bioshock from ~5-6 years ago required ~ 10 GB of space. So if you maintain a steam game collection over a number of years, even if you only add a couple of games a year, you can quickly eat up a lot of HDD space as games grow, and your collection grows.

Similarly, a single sided blu-ray is ~25 GB, double sided is ~50 GB, and the max theoretical capacity for a blu-ray is 200 GB. If your media library ONLY consists of backing up a decent sized blu-ray collection, you're eating up a ton of space.

What about videography? Or photography? Uncompressed (or at least losslessly compressed!) hi-res pictures, and hi-bitrate video eat up a TON of space. If you're curating videos and pictures for your family, your children, or even just your own memories, you can have very demanding storage needs, and if recent history is any example, you can only expect your storage needs to get MORE intense!

 

[ronbo613]

Does A Person Really Use Over 1TB Of Storage

Only when .99999 TB of storage is insufficient.

 

[Topweasel]

If digital hoarders was a show I would be on it. Easier to buy another HDD than to find what is expendable in my pr0n stash.

I am with this guy. Between shows, captures, pron, installers, and my library of mostly un-played steam games, not to mention scattered single use VM's, rather then sort through it, every 3-5 years I just cycle through my drives as I upgrade my system. So in 4 years I expect that I will be replacing my 3x 3TB drives with 5TB drives. Maybe add a 4th.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

All these differing perceptions may be true. Some of us more reticent folks have watched every new wave of higher capacity devices released to the market, with suspicions that they have "early development" problems and higher failure rates. One friend told me only months ago that he won't buy an HDD with capacity over 500GB.

That being said, I'm going to continue browsing at the Egg and other places before I decide exactly WHICH 2 or 3TB drives to add to my system. And by "system," I mean my server. With my server, there's no pressure on me yet to increase the size of my workstation's boot drive, or the other 500GB unit within which is my default DVR capture device.

When I need it, I'll know it!

 

[Essence_of_War]

I decide exactly WHICH 2 or 3TB drives to add to my system.

I don't know that I'd worry too much about this. If you can get a 2 TB for ~$80-90, or a 3 TB for ~$100-120 you're doing fine. Trust no brand. Make good back-ups.

 

[schwett]

yes. of course some people do.

i have about 4tb of photography. raw files from d800e. other people do video, which is even more storage intensive, or maintain a very large media library.

the thing most frequently neglected is backup. once the online storage exceeds the capacity of cheap external drives, it becomes slightly more complex.

 

[XavierMace]

All these differing perceptions may be true. Some of us more reticent folks have watched every new wave of higher capacity devices released to the market, with suspicions that they have "early development" problems and higher failure rates. One friend told me only months ago that he won't buy an HDD with capacity over 500GB.

That's just silly.

 

[Doomer]

I have 1TB drives collecting dust because they're not big enough to meet my needs.

 

[Compman55]

Wait till digital camera's are able to record better than 1080p. You will have it filled in short order.

Repeat after me.......there is no such thing as too much storage.

 

[tweakboy]

If he has over 1000000 nudie pics and porn dvds heee

 

[Anteaus]

I'm using about 6TB and I'm a lightweight compared to some others around here.

 

[Evadman]

Sure. I use ~40TB of the 54 I have on my RAID60 file server with a local backup of the important stuff on a few ReadyNAS NV+'s along with a dell 124T autoloader for backups that I make whenever I get bored and need something to do.

 

[Tristor]

All these differing perceptions may be true. Some of us more reticent folks have watched every new wave of higher capacity devices released to the market, with suspicions that they have "early development" problems and higher failure rates. One friend told me only months ago that he won't buy an HDD with capacity over 500GB.

That's a bit ridiculous. If you wanted some arbitrary metric that has at least a bit of validity in order to limit storage capacities, it'd be to not buy any 2.5" disks with more than a single platter and not to buy any 3.5" disks with more than 3 platters. 4+ platter 3.5" disks typically have higher failure rates, but aren't very common anyway partly because of that. As platter density goes up, so does maximum throughput. Also, as platter density goes up, when short stroking you can hit IOPs targets without reducing as much capacity. Give me single platter 1TB 2.5" 7200RPM SATA disks all day, you put enough of those in a box it'll be mighty speedy.

If your friend is concerned about reliability what are his thoughts on SSDs? NAND flash has limitations that HDDs simply don't, but just like everything in technology it's a trade-off. You get higher performance for a limited lifespan. I don't see how this is a concern, when in almost every environment you might have a 5 year cycle at most (even at home, shorter if you're reasonably tech savvy).

 

[Remobz]

I have never even come close to filling a 500GB drive yet. 1 TB would probably last me my entire life....lol!