what drive capacity would suit you?

That's what I was thinking. Until I read some of the reviews. More expensive than a velociraptor, similar benchmarks, and has a certain amount of read/writes before it stops working. They are definitely the future, but for now I'll wait.

You are just trying to comfort yourself on your VR purchase. Find a benchmark that says they have similar performance (or more limited life). They (Indilinx based drives) are several TIMES (literally) faster than a VR no matter how you look at it (2x for sequential read/write, many many times for random access, which is a lot more important for real life usage). People always talk about the limited life of SSDs because we all know there is a theoretical limit. For rotating motors and platters, there is no theoretical limit, but they usually fail faster in real world. Backup is the only answer.

Low capacity/high price is a valid concern. But if you are concerned about that, you wouldn't be getting a VR. SSDs have largely replaced the segment VR was in (high performance/enthusiastic/low capacity). VRs just aren't worth it anymore.

I shouldn't usually need much space. Unfortunately my tastes complicate matters.

I'm currently using a 350GB drive that came with this computer. Only 50GB are free mostly because of my astronomy applications (Celestia and NightSky are particularly heavy) and MAME.

I also decided sometime ago to scan my entire collection of the Crash magazine in best quality possible. 180GBs that I moved to my laptop for now until I find the courage to start moving everything to DVD.

My laptop has a 120 GB hard drive with 40 GB free.

I also have a 40 GB external hard drive that I mainly use for backups, and it has about 20 GB free.

16.5 GB used, 128 free on this computer. A lot of what I do with this computer is entertainment based, or I'm doing my homework, so there is nothing on here like, say, every issue of Crash magazine or a giant photo collage of myself.

Originally Posted by whiteflags

16.5 GB used

I miss my toshiba

so there is nothing on here like, say, every issue of Crash magazine or a giant photo collage of myself.

Hehe. Some months ago I was moving some boxes in the attic and because the entrance from inside the house isn't very large, I was moving everything out through an outside ladder. Smart... Anyways, the Crash magazines box (heavy!) fell of my hands dropped two stories below and rolled over right onto this big rain puddle.

I don't remember climbing down the ladder.
Got to it and thankfully they were intact despite the box cartoon being all soaked. Because accidents happen I decided I should "backup" my collection.

At home I have two 250GB drives. . . both are about 90% full. I have about 15 different Linux installs on them. I've got about 8 different 64bit kernels running 4 uClibC installs and 4 GlibC installs.

The wife takes pictures of the kids too. . . it is AMAZING how many pics she takes. ~ 8GB worth. . . that'd be 2 DVDs to put in the safe. . . Do you realize how long it takes to burn two FULL DVDs. . .

Total: 20TB
Used: 4TB

I've just upgraded all the discs on the farm. ^_^

Soma

let see...

Desktop:
435GB used / 1.1TB

Laptop:
40GB used / 180GB

UMPC:
10GB used / 32GB SSD

the desktop contains all my multimedia. I have 4 external drives. The amount actually in my tower is 450GB.

This is something that I'm curious about. I can see that a lot of people have multimedia that they haven't created themselves (e.g. movies) taking up considerable amounts of disk space.

Most of my colleagues in work have at least one 500GB drive, and here I am with a 160GB Travelstar RAID-1 (mirrored) drive and it's only 60% full. I have an install of Windows, some apps, Steam w/ Source engine games, Visual C++ 2005 and a whole stack of my projects. And I. Literally. Can't. Put. Anything. Else. On. There.

There's nothing else that I really need. Sure, I could download random things, but for me it's always been a question of need. Films usually come on discs (Unless you're hokey ). You stick them in the drive, watch them, then put them away again. Is that too much effort or what?

Disks get scratched, broken in half by a bad insertion into the optical drive, get lost, or have mold grow on them. All those things happened to me (well, my disks).

Disks get scratched, broken in half by a bad insertion into the optical drive, get lost, or have mold grow on them. All those things happened to me (well, my disks).

On the other hand, hard drives fail (I seem to have bad luck with that...) I've started keeping backups in both forms of everything I can.

True, that's why I have a RAID-5 server for that (I don't think my data is important enough to have an offsite backup... if my house gets burned down, I will have more important things to worry about). Copying all disks to harddrive makes backing up easier. I have had a total of 3 harddrives fail on me in the last 3 years or so.

Also, discs take up space. Especially movies/games/whatever. The more you have, the more the space.
As for data on the hard drive? 0. Not a physical millimeter of space. Of course hard drives take up place, but they take far, far, far less place than the equivalent amount of discs.

Originally Posted by cyberfish

Disks get scratched, broken in half by a bad insertion into the optical drive,

Do you have to wear a "splash guard" on the keyboard too?

I've used hundreds of CD's for music and data for several decades and I've only damaged one once, when it got pop on it, which would have been fine, but I was too impatient to wash it in the sink and so I wiped it off with an acetone cloth. Sounds really dumb (yes) but I use acetone all the time on the top surface to clean the label. Needless to say, the bottom surface reacts VERY badly to this...

But they last forever if you take care of them. They are far better form of permanent storage than any kind of hard drive.

Originally Posted by SMurf

Films usually come on discs (Unless you're hokey ).

A lot of people record their favourite TV shows. That's not done on VHS tapes anymore, it's done on hard-disks. Burn that to DVD's? Why on earth would anybody waste his time doing that if he can get 1TB disks for just under 60€?
No matter how little you value the time it'd take to burn 1TB of data, it can't be less than 60 bucks.

Originally Posted by SMurf

You stick them in the drive, watch them, then put them away again. Is that too much effort or what?

Exactly. Not to mention all the physical space they take up. It's also hard to zap through the episodes if they're stored on discs

Originally Posted by cyberfish

I have had a total of 3 harddrives fail on me in the last 3 years or so.

The last drive that failed me had a capacity of 40MB. That's right, megabytes. And it was large at that time
What do you do with your disks?

Originally Posted by MK27

But they last forever if you take care of them. They are far better form of permanent storage than any kind of hard drive.

Only until you consider the efforts involved in creating backups. It's easy with harddrives but backing up hundreds of DVDs doesn't sound like fun to me...