Biggest hard drive (pissing contest)

[doctorrg]

Kitchen PC, 180GB

You've got a PC in the Kitchen?

I should count mine up properly, but as a rough estimate I think we've got around 35TB in raw storage capacity in-house, 22TB in our two NAS systems alone. Main NAS is 6*3TB (RAID6 12TB usable), Backup NAS is 2*2TB (RAID1 2TB usable). And then 6 PCs, 5 laptops, media players, HTPC, consoles, external drives, there's quite a bit of storage around.

 

[TB]

Maybe because here in the US we got a TV show called Storage Wars *snip*

Or maybe it's because half an hour before you started this thread he posted this.

 

[Sharky.]

This thread has elements from from this one, too, which I think is why my spidey sense was tingling.

 

[RX-7_FD3S]

Ok here's mine :

PC :
1x 128gb SSD
1x 3to
1x 1.5to
3x 1to external

Laptop:
1x 1to

PS3
80gb

Xbox360x3
160gb combined.

Spare parts :
1x250gb
1x80gb

Total is 9402 I think.

 

[Ibonibo]

Game PC:
500GB (win)
1TB (Games)
750gb (storage)
1.5TB (My Pics & Vids)
3TB (Backup)
600Gb (currently in use)

Server PC:
300GB (win)
1TB (Storage)
3Tb (Back up)


Other:
500Gb (music in car)
250Gb (PS3)
500Gb (Ps3 fat)
60GB (Ps3 original)
160Gb (Music Backup)
500Gb (Vids back up)
250Gb (Xbox)

=13870Gb (if I would list family owed Hdd it probably goes way above 20Tb)

 

[Furinkazen]

670GB Laptop with a 1TB back up drive.

 

[Wiegert]

1TB (current laptop)
250GB (first HDD from my old laptop)
250GB (current HDD in my old laptop)
250GB (current Xbox 360)
20GB (original Xbox 360 Premium HDD)
120GB (PS3 Slim)

= 1890GB

 

[BobK]

I come up with 22.8 TB but that's not counting all of my son's machines or backup drives.

 

[Tesla]

74GB

Wow. What do you need that much space for?

Reading old posts about storage is always good fun.

 

[Joel]

I personally only have a 40gb laptop drive and my 74gb Raptor, which is awaiting a processor and ram.

My roommate, however, has 1.75tb of hard drive space on his PERSONAL computer. Thats ridiculous.

This is hilarious.

It's like looking through all your old conputer stuff.

 

[Danoff]

3x3TB drives with 1 redundant. I don't know if that counts as 6 or 9 TB.

Then I have another computer with 1TB, and another with 3TB.

 

[Punknoodle]

3x3TB drives with 1 redundant. I don't know if that counts as 6 or 9 TB.

Then I have another computer with 1TB, and another with 3TB.

Holy thread bump batman!

Gaming PC: 1x 250GB SSD (will be adding at least a 500GB 7,200 RPM HDD soon)

Laptop: 1x 250GB SSD

External: 1x 2TB HDD

 

[TenEightyOne]

I remember fitting a 38Mb HDD and wondering how I'd ever fill it.... happy, innocent days...

 

[Azuremen]

I remember fitting a 38Mb HDD and wondering how I'd ever fill it.... happy, innocent days...

And now I work with 10Gb or larger files

3 x 2TB HDD
500GB HDD
128GB SSD
128GB SSD (Laptop)
4TB External HDD
500GB External HDD

Some redundancy to make sure image files are safe, though the whole setup is getting cumbersome and I need to develop a better workflow in terms of how I keep track of edited files.

 

[Grayfox]

From this

To this

Then I do this.

 

[JoshB1984]

235~GB free space on 576GB(600GB WD Black HDD). Every time I worries my HDD space will fill up quick.

 

[Exorcet]

I've never cared much for HDD space, even if it's cheap I tend to never come close to using all of it.

I have my original laptop which is either 80 or 160 GB, it's needed a new motherboard for a while know so I many never know.

My second laptop has 640 GB, which I considered infinite space at the time. As of now after 1-2 reformats and demoting this laptop to my travel computer/semi-backup drive, I've only used about 2/3 the space available.

My latest laptop has a 1 TB drive that I almost filled by using data recovery software that for some reason duplicated the data it recovered. So with 2-3 copies of some large files or folders, I reached near 900 GB. After going through and sorting the duplicates, I'm sitting around 1/3 full.

The previously mentioned data recovery issue lead to me to buy an external drive that I can't remember the size of. I think it's 2 TB.

I'm planning on buying a desktop. SSD required, probably shooting for 256 GB at least. HDD for bulk storage I'll probably go for 1 TB or more.

I have 3 primary USB sticks, one is 64 GB, the second is 32, and the last is 8. I've got a bunch of random smaller ones too from friends as gifts, from job fairs, from school, etc.

If I can count stuff from the office, I have access to a 1.5 PB drive. All too easy to fill.

 

[GBO Possum]

I've never cared much for HDD space, even if it's cheap I tend to never come close to using all of it.

Having an excess of storage capacity is always a good idea for improved performance.

On a hard drive, it reduces seek times, and for many accesses, eliminates head movement. On an SSD it increases the write lifetime. On both it comes close to eliminating fragmentation. Fragmentation is a bad thing on any device since it complicates directory accesses.

My PS3 has less than 100GB used on a 750GB drive. Graphic glitches are pretty much eliminated. (Such as frame rate and pop in effects). Menus are much snappier with noticeably shortened load times.

So my recommendation, as a storage guy, is to get the largest HDD you can find for your PS3 making sure it spins at 7,200 rpm or faster. Unless you enjoy long load times!

Back on topic....

My iMac has 250GB SSD and a 2TB internal drive, with about 12TBs external
MacBook Pro from 2008 has a 1TB SSD inside
Main PS3 has 750GB hybrid drive
Two PS3s which feed the side screens in my GT rig have 160GB each. I think. Anyway, way over what is needed!

Performance is excellent on all of the above.

 

[acascianelli]

PC: 120gb SSD, 400gb HDD
PS3: 500gb
NAS: 2x750gb RAID1, 1TB external backup.

I've been on the fence about upgrading the drives in my NAS for a while, but I'm only using 50% of the space on it right now so it's not that big of a priority for me.

 

[Bopop4]

I was given a 20GB hard drive by someone who knows nothing about computers, yippee...

1TB PC, 2TB external for movies, and a 4TB for backup of everything.

I'm trying to convince myself to go for a SSD, but I can't find any reasons why I need one.

 

[acascianelli]

I'm trying to convince myself to go for a SSD, but I can't find any reasons why I need one.

Have you ever used a computer with an SSD? I would bet you that a computer of half the speed as yours would seem twice as fast with an SSD.

Look at the differences in seek times and transfer speeds between the fastest desktop HDD and an average SSD.

 

[Bopop4]

Have you ever used a computer with an SSD? I would bet you that a computer of half the speed as yours would seem twice as fast with an SSD.

Look at the differences in seek times and transfer speeds between the fastest desktop HDD and an average SSD.

I have not.
I'm guessing that load times would be nearly instant.
Like when I plug my hard drive into the theater system, it takes about 20 seconds for it to spool up and be ready to play something, whereas a usb stick is good to go as soon as you plug it in.

I don't mind the several second wait to turn on the computer.
I mainly play games that are very CPU demanding, would the SSD help at all there? I was always thinking that I would be better off getting a faster processor.

 

[ProjectWHaT]

From this

To this

 

[Jump_Ace]

I have a 6TB RAID 1 to house my data at home, it's got about 500GB of free space. I wish they'd hurry up and make 5TB drives more available so 4TB will plummet in price.


Jerome

 

[BobK]

Having an excess of storage capacity is always a good idea for improved performance.

On a hard drive, it reduces seek times, and for many accesses, eliminates head movement. On an SSD it increases the write lifetime. On both it comes close to eliminating fragmentation. Fragmentation is a bad thing on any device since it complicates directory accesses.

Close, but not quite. I'd agree with excess capacity usually helping performance, but not quite for the reason you give. It won't so much help performance as delay the loss of performance due to fragmentation (in the case of hard drives) and increases write lifetime on SSDs simply because there are more blocks available to be written to.

Fragmentation can be a very big issue for hard drives but it's a complete non-issue for SSDs. Fragmentation increases seek times (for files occupying more than one allocation unit) on hard drives but the seek time for SSDs is essentially zero since there are no physical heads that have to be moved from one cylinder to another.

 

[GBO Possum]

Close, but not quite. I'd agree with excess capacity usually helping performance, but not quite for the reason you give. It won't so much help performance as delay the loss of performance due to fragmentation (in the case of hard drives) and increases write lifetime on SSDs simply because there are more blocks available to be written to.

Fragmentation can be a very big issue for hard drives but it's a complete non-issue for SSDs. Fragmentation increases seek times (for files occupying more than one allocation unit) on hard drives but the seek time for SSDs is essentially zero since there are no physical heads that have to be moved from one cylinder to another.

Close, but not quite. Actually, not even close. The largest positive performance impact for HDDs is due to the following factors which result from underutilizing the available capacity.

• The data is concentrated in the outer cylinders where the track capacities are larger. This increased track capacity reduces the number of seeks, and increases the average data transfer rate.
• Since the data is concentrated in this outer area, the average seek distance is reduced, which reduces the amount of time spent seeking.

Fragmentation is not a non-issue for SSDs. Fragmentation causes the number of I/Os required to read and write files and their directories to increase. Seek time on SSDs is not zero, and each extra I/O requires extra CPU cycles both to initiate the I/O and to do clean-up. It also complicates memory management.

SSDs suffer a so-called wear factor. This is caused by writes, but not reads. So any SSD has a specified number of terabytes which can be written before performance degrades. The larger the SSD, the greater is this TB written threshold.

Trust me, I know what I'm talking about. I have worked in the storage industry since the late 1960s and have not yet fully retired.

 

[BobK]

Close, but not quite. Actually, not even close. The largest positive performance impact for HDDs is due to the following factors which result from underutilizing the available capacity.

• The data is concentrated in the outer cylinders where the track capacities are larger. This increased track capacity reduces the number of seeks, and increases the average data transfer rate.
• Since the data is concentrated in this outer area, the average seek distance is reduced, which reduces the amount of time spent seeking.

Okay, yes that's true, moreso for variable geometry drives than fixed geometry but then again hardly any drives use fixed geometry nowadays. In any case, anything that minimizes head movement is a good thing. And a contiguous file on the innermost tracks will still be read much faster than a badly fragmented file scattered over the outermost third of the disk would be.

Fragmentation is not a non-issue for SSDs. Fragmentation causes the number of I/Os required to read and write files and their directories to increase. Seek time on SSDs is not zero, and each extra I/O requires extra CPU cycles both to initiate the I/O and to do clean-up. It also complicates memory management.

Here I disagree with you. If a file occupies ten allocation units on the medium, it's going to require ten directory consultations and data reads regardless of where the data physically is on the device; doesn't matter if they're contiguous or scattered all over the place. As a practical matter it probably won't require ten actual directory reads of course; it'll read it all at once and buffer it. Exact details are, of course, filesystem-dependent and OS-dependent.

I have no idea how it would complicate memory management. Please educate me.

SSDs suffer a so-called wear factor. This is caused by writes, but not reads. So any SSD has a specified number of terabytes which can be written before performance degrades. The larger the SSD, the greater is this TB written threshold.

Yep. The key point is that a given allocation unit can only be written to a fixed number of times, and the max number of writes per allocation unit is independent of the overall device capacity. Currently that ranges from 5000 or so writes per block to 15,000 depending on if you ask the engineering department or the marketing department.

Trust me, I know what I'm talking about. I have worked in the storage industry since the late 1960s and have not yet fully retired.

The first disk device I laid my hands on was an RCA Spectra 70/564i, for what that's worth. Other storage devices I've worked on/troubleshot included the 70/442 and RCA 582. And the IBM 1402, if you want to count card equipment.

 

[Davidies]

This laptop has 677GB, with only 297GB left. And that's after 9 months.

Hoping that a 1TB HDD in my new computer will be better.

 

[starknight97]

2TB if you include my backup drive.

 

[Murcie_LP640]

I have not.
I'm guessing that load times would be nearly instant.
Like when I plug my hard drive into the theater system, it takes about 20 seconds for it to spool up and be ready to play something, whereas a usb stick is good to go as soon as you plug it in.

I don't mind the several second wait to turn on the computer.
I mainly play games that are very CPU demanding, would the SSD help at all there? I was always thinking that I would be better off getting a faster processor.

While I haven't gone so far as to installing the same games twice on my SSD and one of my HDDs for comparison, I'm sure one of the more accomplished computer people here would be able to confirm the SSD does help speed up boot times for games as well. The games I play load up like lightning from my SSD. Now that I think about it the slowest game to load up has been Watch_Dogs which I have installed on my HDD, dunno if it's coincidental or no.

Time for a cold boot from press of the power button to log on screen is roughly 7-8 seconds.

On the subject of storage:

Laptop: 1x256GB SSD, 2x1TB HDDs (2.2TB)
External: 1.5TB HDD
Xbox 360: 60GB (still rocking an old Premium )
Xbox One: 500GB