What You Think Is The Ideal Hard Drive Capacity?

[OhSnapWord]

Your really saying that it does not have to be accurate or reliable for every situation, Rule of thumb - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

What I'm saying is that generally the backup drive should be at least the same size as the drive you're backing up. Is it positively necessary? No. However it does need to be large enough to accommodate the data you plan to back up.

...Sure I'd like to have a large drive in my system but my only concern is how to back it up...

External drives are the way to go for the average Joe user when it comes to backup. The odds of your hard drive and backup drive going belly up at the same time are pretty slim. Of course there are cloud-based backup solutions that will backup all of your data, however those are only good as a backup of a backup and are only effective if you have an always-on broadband internet connection.

If I do a low-cost RAID...

Don't get me wrong, I like RAID. I like RAID a lot.

RAID is not a backup solution. It was never meant to be a backup solution. The intent and purpose of RAID is maximum performance and uptime. if you're running a RAID 1, 5, 6 or 0+1/1+0, if one of the drives goes down, you could swap it out and the array will rebuild with no downtime if the system supports hot-swap. RAID will not protect you if you accidentally delete a file, the OS becomes corrupt or a virus wipes out your data. You would be just as screwed as you would be if you're running a single drive.

 

[Celery]

I used to have a 500 gig drive partitioned to two 250s. One will be the boot/system and the other data/storage. Whatever happens to the C partition doesn't affect the D partition. The only way to lose the D partition is for the drive to die.

I haven't run out of space even when I stored concerts and movies to D. I'm just a casual user.

Now that I built a new system I bought a 1TB Seagate Constellation drive, also partitioned into two, because it's made for a server (cost more but love it) and 5 year warranty.

I don't need the size but I like the longevity.

 

[dale]

I tend to use about ~20 GB of space for work files, per job. At one point I had over 70 GB, but that was out of the norm.

I am not big on photography. My personal projects take up less than 10 GB. Media files take up ~100 GB. Games, no more than 100 GB.

The terabyte drives these days are more than enough for me. My space requirements have stagnated around 300 GB since the days when <100 GB HDD was the norm, and it has not increased significantly since.

OT: I know this person who would store movies on her HDD (and eventually, on DVD). Her rate of storage grew to a point that it was much higher than her rate of processing, i.e., having the time to actually sit down and enjoy the stuff she stored. As the files filled up her HDD, she had to burn them into DVD. Then as DVD filled up her room, she had to find another room for storage. True story.

 

[BK_123]

At the moment on my 500GB portable hard drive I am using 77.6 GB..

 

[Celery]

OT: I know this person who would store movies on her HDD (and eventually, on DVD). Her rate of storage grew to a point that it was much higher than her rate of processing, i.e., having the time to actually sit down and enjoy the stuff she stored. As the files filled up her HDD, she had to burn them into DVD. Then as DVD filled up her room, she had to find another room for storage. True story.

If she's bootlegging movies no need to talk about it, this is a public forum.

 

[BK_123]

If she's bootlegging movies no need to talk about it, this is a public forum.

And that is none of our business anyway.

 

[dale]

If she's bootlegging movies no need to talk about it, this is a public forum.

Keep your speculations to yourself. My post was fine as is.

 

[BK_123]

Keep your speculations to yourself. My post was fine as is.

Lets not start an argument or I will close the thread!

 

[setishock]

So going on OhSnapWord's last post I'm going to have to give some thought to what my next hard drive purchase is going to be. Either 2 500 gig or 1 2TB.

 

[strollin]

My stance on this subject is that you can never be too rich, too good looking or have too much disk space!

I like to have plenty of disk space available to store whatever I want/need. As discussed, backups aren't really that big an issue since disk drive space is cheap enough today that an appropriately sized external drive can be used to perform backups.

A few years ago when hard drives were still super expensive, I remember having to backup to a tape drive because an external hdd was cost prohibitive. Not only that but USB and eSata didn't exist yet so an external drive was pretty rare. Tape backups were excruciatingly slow to where it would take hours to backup a 200MB drive. Restoring was equally slow with the tape drive whirring away shuffling back and forth to retrieve your data.