Running out of HD space....

[Harrison]

My HD situation is very nice at the moment.. about 7TB in total!

When I built my new PC in March I decided to take all my older PCs and build 2 really good second and third systems from all of their parts to use as new emulation and download systems, as the current ones were getting older.

Once I had built the 2 systems I configured the oldest of them as my new download and test server and as that is the only one of my new main 3 systems now using PATA drives it got all the best ones I had.

And then for the other PC, that is used for emulation, I had a spare 120GB SATA drive for the boot drive, and then I purchased 4 new 1TB Samsung SATA drives. 3 for the emulation system and one for the main system to go with the 2 500GB HDD and another 120GB drive.

So my 3 main system setups now have the following drives:

Download/Test Server (Jade):

200GB + 200GB + 160GB = 560GB

Emulation system (Soprano):

120GB (boot drive) + 3x 1TB = 3.12TB

Main System (Tsunami):

120GB (boot drive) + 2x 500GB + 1TB = 2.12TB

External USB2 HDD:

500GB

NAS (Arc1):

500GB

That leaves me with 3 further PCs that are not used much.

Backup spare PC (Yuna) (if one of the others goes wrong):

120GB + 60GB = 180GB

Linux PC (Aeris):

60GB

DOSBox PC

12GB

Giving me 7.05TB

[Submeg]

ATM, main laptop: 60 GB
music laptop: 300 GB
externals: 250 GB + 500 GB + 750 GB = 1.5 TB

TOTAL: 1.96 TB

[burns flipper]

I feel I am lagging behind. I have 1.5 + 6 + 21 + 45 + 146 = 219.5GB free in my machine and only 500 + 160 = 660GB free on my externals. That's not even 1TB

I am ashamed to have so little free space

[Bloodwych]

Man, you data whores! That's some serious storage! I tend to only download and keep what I use.

For data storage, I have two SATA 500GB hard drives on my media PC and one 250GB external eSATA. I basically have only about 100GB of files that are mirrored on the two 500 gig'ers (not RAID) and the 250GB eSATA. That's three copies, although the external only gets updated about once a month. I also do DVD-R and DVD-RW backups once a year or so when I can be arsed (ie hardly ever!)

That 100GB includes full ROM sets (but not huge CHD files or CD images) of my favourite retro machines, MP3 album collection, software, drivers, pictures, personal files etc. Like I said, I just keep what I use and don't hoard stuff up.

I think another reason I don't have a huge data stockpile is I never keep xvid or HD movies on my hard drives, only music and short video clips. Since I tend to watch a movie once every five years or so, I'd just rather buy it and store it on the DVD/bluray it comes on. Can't be arsed to mess on encoding or having it stored on the hard drive only for it to be accessed once in a blue moon. Same with CD images - just burn them to disk then delete unless they're important.

[Harrison]

I also tend to watch a film then burn it to disc and delete the copy from the HDD. Don't think I have any movies on my HDs at the moment.

Most of mine is taken up with rom sets and cd sets on my emulation system, stuff I'm seeding and downloading on the download system, and design work and installed games on my main system. I currently have quite a lot of space free across the three systems as I recently backed everything up to DVD and tidied everything up. That took some time.

[Bloodwych]

To be truthful, I'm glad you all collect and store these complete emulation sets and images. It's what makes torrents so awesome! Also means there is interesting stuff backed up all around the world for future generations!

Yes I agree Harrision, backing up data is such a pain when using DVDs even at 16x speed. I tend to rely quite heavily on the external hard drive now. Bring on the Blueray burners!

[Harrison]

Very true. HDs are now so cheap you can justify using one for backing up these days. I have an external 500GB drive just for that purpose, mainly to mirror my MP3 collection as I could never be bothered to back that up to DVD or CD any more.