So...what do you guys fill your drives with?

[testtube5]

So this is just a question out of pure curiosity, what kind of data do you fill your drives with? (Besides the usual "porn lolol")

I play a lot of games, I download a lot of movies, among other things. Yet, I've never filled more than 600GB of space in my life.

Assuming some hypothetical person does the same thing I do, why would he/she ever need a drive larger than 1TB? Or, do they not?

Those of you with 4TB, 6TB, 12TB HDDs...what are you using all that space for?

 

[Corwin65]

Backups, and Music Production Software and samples, games, pictures.

 

[SchizTech]

My collection of blu-ray rips is over 1TB. There are also a few smaller folders with my music (40GB perhaps) and, to help me out at work, a backup of a whole bunch of disk image files (Windows, Mac OS installer images, diagnostic tools and other)

 

[faalin]

I have a 6TB WD red pro and has just short of 3TB filled from Steam, Blizard, Origin, and older DOS games.

Also found out that Comcast has a 1TB data limit in our area last month, guess i cant download my hole steam library in one month

 

[Solandri]

I have a 4x4TB file server (a bit less than 12TB usable after redundancy). I haven't checked recently, but last time I checked it had nearly 6 TB of photos I've taken over 20+ years, both digital and scans of slides and negatives. (The scans take a *lot* more space. I also have all those negatives and slides in a box in my closet, which I need to revisit at some point because I lost a HDD full of scans around 2005.)

The rest (about 3 TB) is taken up by a small movie collection (basically rips of my BluRays) + anime, infrequently-used virtual machines, and backups of other computers around the house. I also had rips of all my CDs, but I seem to have lost the folder. I'm sure it's on the server somewhere, I just don't know where anymore. It was just a backup in case a CD went bad or was destroyed (I started doing it after the metal data layer on a music CD started corroding from the outside edge).

Edit: Oh yeah, install disk images from my old Microsoft Technet subscription. I downloaded as much as I could before they shut it down. Pretty much every Microsoft OS and software product from about 2000-2012.

The sweet spot in HDD prices right now is around 4 TB. That's where you're paying the least $ per GB. So rather than buy a 1 TB drive, you're better off spending $10-$20 more to get a 2 TB or a little more for a 4 TB, and filling up the extra space with backups. Skip a few meals at McDonalds.

 

[Scottray]

I'd agree with your initial assessment. All the PC's in my family don't get filled up. However, that taking into account that we don't download videos. We also have a home server. That's filled up with about 2TB - backups of all the PC's, pictures and some music.

 

[hang-the-9]

So this is just a question out of pure curiosity, what kind of data do you fill your drives with? (Besides the usual "porn lolol")

I play a lot of games, I download a lot of movies, among other things. Yet, I've never filled more than 600GB of space in my life.

Assuming some hypothetical person does the same thing I do, why would he/she ever need a drive larger than 1TB? Or, do they not?

Those of you with 4TB, 6TB, 12TB HDDs...what are you using all that space for?

Good question, outside of programs like games (I have 4 people that play games, me, wife, daughter and son, so we have a bunch of different setups on the main computer), my storage is mostly movie files. All my DVDs are on the network, and me and my son also play pool so we have a lot of pool videos and instructional videos stored as well. I would say over 2 TB of video files, the standard def stuff come out to be 1-2 GB a movie/video and the HD stuff is about 4-5,6 GB for bluray movies in MP4 format. We have quite a few photos also, but that is not nearly as much storage.

I have 3 copies of most of my files, original, a backup and a second backup of most things. I have never re-used a hard drive, if I need to get a larger drive or go from a standard drive to a solid state for an upgrade, I remove the drive and get a new one. Counting the smaller older drives I have, I have probably 4-5 backups of parts of my files but at least one backup of all of them, two backups of most of them, and several more of some of my older files.

Random stuff I keep are OS and application disks in ISO format and some other files, bunch of scripts I wrote for work stuff over the years, I also do a lot of computer work outside of my real job so keep storage free for those files, outside of the storage I use every day I have about 4-5 external drive of sizes from 250 Gb to 2TB for file transfers and backups of other people's systems. All but the largest drive is a solid state drive in a USB 3 enclosure I put in myself so make sure there are no issues with just taking the drive out of the enclosure. There is also a stack of 250gb - 1.5 TB desktop drives in the basement and over the garage/barn from older systems and for spares.

A lot of storage available but I would say what is used outside of application space is about 3.5 TB between video and pictures.