Disk space is abundant and cheap. These days, you can get a 2 TB hard drive for under $100 from Newegg. I remember one of my first work computers, about 10 years ago, that came with a whopping 2 GB of storage. Those days are long gone. With the move to solid state drives, though, storage space is getting smaller, at least on a single solid state drive. My MacBook Air has a 128 GB drive, which would have felt humongous even a few years ago, but now feels small compared to my Windows 7 machine.
What do you think? Is disk size even as important as it once was? With the move towards the cloud, I’m finding that I don’t miss a bigger drive in my Air (but, then again, I’m not editing video on it).
How much disk space do you have? How much of it have you used? And do you feel that you have enough?
If you’re feeling constrained for space, tomorrow we’ll take a look at how to free up anywhere from one to three GB by removing Windows 7 Service Pack 1 backup files.
Tony says:
My MacBook Pro has 250gb, with 195gb free. I store most of my data in Dropbox. Backups stored in a 1.5 tb external.
May 8, 2011 — 9:12 pm
Evan Kline says:
Ahhhh, Dropbox. I’ve really been toying with getting a paid account, so I could just put my Documents folder in it.
May 12, 2011 — 5:26 pm
Tony says:
Speaking of Dropbox, it seems that things are looking good for the company these days…http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/05/dropbox-ftc/
May 15, 2011 — 5:34 pm
Evan Kline says:
Doesn’t exactly fill one with confidence, does it? While I think this might be a bit overblow, it does make me think twice. Tomorrow we’re going to be looking at an app that helps secure your Dropbox contents, in a pretty seamless way. Windows only at the moment, but Mac and Linux are reported to be on the way.
May 23, 2011 — 1:31 pm
techandlife says:
1 TB drive with 230GB used. I don’t do much downloading of media (yet) so this should be fine for a year or two.
May 9, 2011 — 2:52 am
Evan Kline says:
Sounds like you’re in good shape. I have about that ratio on my Air (albeit a much smaller drive), but I’m very selective in what I put on that. I avoid media, too.
May 12, 2011 — 5:28 pm
Marcus says:
I have a MacBook Pro with a 250GB hard drive and have around 50GB left. I do most of my work in the cloud though and so don’t have a fear of running out of space as I also have a 2TB eternal for backup. I think that in the future less will be done on the computer itself and more done over the web (as things go now). Th risks of this type of situation are not yet fully known though and so I think for that reason alone people will remain cautious.
May 9, 2011 — 4:51 am
Evan Kline says:
I think you’re right, Marcus. Also, with the new Macs, external storage will be almost as good as internal, with the new Thunderbolt ports. Desktop space will be the only negative.
May 12, 2011 — 5:27 pm
janevir says:
I have a Dell Inspiron notebook (a year old) with 4 GB hard drive and 1.84 GB free. I have a lot of music and photos on it, and use the whole Microsoft Office Suite, and I’m happy with how my machine is functioning. Yes, I’m happy with the space I have.
May 9, 2011 — 10:38 am
Evan Kline says:
4 GB? I didn’t know they made them that size any longer. Do you mean 40?
May 12, 2011 — 5:29 pm
Bryann says:
Depends on usage. I’m well over 2tb+ and I still have lots of media backed up. Mostly music, but I don’t find myself needing more anytime soon. However, even if stuff is already backed up in the cloud and off-site, I still fancy getting more identical disks to do RAID Z with ZFS for my home servers. Just because I’m paranoid like that. :P
May 10, 2011 — 2:50 am
Evan Kline says:
Sounds like you take the crown, Bryann. On my PC, I have almost 2 TB of storage, mostly for video editing.
May 12, 2011 — 5:30 pm
Antonia says:
Strangely enough, i still have a 500mb HDD somewhere around, it’s from the first PC my father bought. The thing i noticed is that no matter how much space you have, it’s never enough. Right now i have about 700gb on two HDDs and i only have 2gb free space. You may wonder where the hell did the space go. Well, i have A LOT of music, and a great deal of movies i’ll probably never watch.
June 17, 2011 — 10:44 pm
Evan Kline says:
Yep, it’s the movies that fill things up in a hurry. A coworker was questioning yesterday how I could have so much used space on my Air, which is only 6 months old. He wasn’t taking into account how much space just a few videos use.
And that 500 MB drive of yours might take the prize for the smallest I’ve heard of in a long time.
June 21, 2011 — 7:19 am