how do you max out your hard disk capacity?

hi all, i'm just curious, what do you max out your hdd capacity? what do you store? i use 320gb, use for personal & business, store pics, music, but still i have lots lots of rooms left. so i wonder what you guys do with higher cap like 500gb.

 

It's not hard to max out a 500gb HDD. All you need to do is start storing your movie collection in your HDD and you'll fill it up in no time.

 

Thats easy:

Music
Games
Movies
Pictures

A game can be anywhere from 3 to 10gb
Music adds up if you have a lot of files
Movies/Anime also take up a lot of space and add up fast.

If you actually do video work like me a RAW video file can be well over 2gb just for 1 minute.

Pictures - If you take full res shots and store them from your camera that adds up too, A full memory card from my D70 is like 2GB worth of pictures and I can fill it up in a days shooting easy.

Im constantly having to manage my space on my desktop (almost daily) and it has over 1TB of space, and my laptop is doing ok right now with dual 250gb drives but I could max it out in one sitting if I wanted some of my desktop stuff on here.

I must say if your a movie collector H264 is a must. I started ripping my DVD's with XVID, and about half way is when I learned how to encode with x264 and I can cut the size nearly in half with x264.

 

storing DVD ISOs? or Blu Ray ISOs??

 

Waistfull IMO you can encode it to be 1/5th the size of the original ISO with a non detectable loss of quality.

If you want an ISO your better off to just make a backup of the disk.

 

Games are a pretty big part for me; I have a Steam library of 20-odd games, some of which exceed 16GB in size, not to mention a few other non-Steam games.

I also have about 70GB of music, and I'm just starting to add movies as well. I've filled most of my 320GB drive with that; I'm going to have to start uninstalling some games soon, or managing my music on an external drive.

 

Sounds about right. Add in Vista and Office 2007 Ultimate and you're outta space!

 

30gigs of steam games. some large apps, maple, matlab. music
and music can take up ungodly amount of space if you go lossless.

 

Easy.... Use FRAPS.

 

Yep lossless anything kills space and is best reserved for your backup hard drive somewhere.

I would recommend AVC for audio. AVC is to MP3 what H264 is to Xvid/Divx its a more compressed high quality version of Mp3 so you can get higher quality with less space.

 

LOL fraps...like 10gbs a minute at my resolution!

 

I've got like 20GB filled on a 64GB main drive... and 3GB filled on a 4GB main drive...





I usually keep all my media on dedicated storage drives; I've got about 600GB of anime and media spread out on two 500GB spinners. Never even get close to filling up my "working" drives.

 

Yep as its just RAW, its amazing how small it gets after encoding it though.

From 10gb to less than 10mb.

 

Lossless does indeed take up lots of space. Just a single 5 minute track recorded at 32 float, 44100 sample size will eat 100 megs - up the sample size even slightly and that will treble soon enough!

 

i'd still go with FLAC if space is no issue, storage is relatively cheap now days imo.

 

total. 350GB of Movies, TV shows, Music...
my current storage on my Desktop = 2TB (1TB back up)

 

I've used up 43GB out of 75GB on my laptop, thanks to reformatting a few days ago. It would have been filled to the brim had I not done that. Now I just keep my games and music stored. My 320GB external is filled and my 1TB external is a little over half filled. 720p movies will kill your space like nothing!

 

Come on now, fess up, it's the p0rn that takes the space. Since 70+% of traffic on the web is p0rn, it must be going somewhere....

- Tim

 

720p "movies" heh. We all know what kinda movies...

 

I left auto record on a few shows on my computer. Wow did that fill up fast.

 

Lots of DVD-movies, lots of tv-series, a small amount of music, a couple of games + the operatingsystem (with updates) and some applications easily fills up my 320GB hard drive. I could use atleast twice the space if not more, so i don't have to free up my hard drive space everyday!

 

Same here, you can't listen to thousands of hours of music, so why not just keep what you actually like in the best quality possible?

I keep a flac copy on a secondary desktop harddrive and then have all my used music in 300KB/s Ogg. Its as good as I can hear as I don't have the training or equipment to hear more detail that then. I get about 6-7 disks per GB, which while several times less then most people keep their mp3s at, is more then small enough for me.

---------------------------------------------

I should note that I'm only using about 100GB on my main disk, but I don't think it would be hard to fill if I collected more video and games (which are now all >10GB, compared to <1GB as they were just a few years ago.

 

Mostly movies if I'm going to fill up my hard drive - which I was the first six months or so I had it. 10 full-length DVD's, some with extra features, took up 60 GB.

Games also take up a lot of space, and virtual machines. Each virtual machine is 5-10 GB, more if you run lots of programs in it, unless it's a small, old operating system like Windows 98. And games are a lot, especially if you play mods. Then the nice innocuous 3 GB game can take up 20 GB thanks to all the mods. Free demos can also take up a lot if you don't uninstall them. As can downloaded setup files if you don't delete them in a timely manner.

At the moment I'm using 74 GB not counting anything Windows 7 related. That takes up an additional 52 GB, mostly because I have it installed thrice, and secondarily because I have many programs installed on it that I already have installed on XP. I only have one movie on my hard drive now - it just wasn't practical enough to have them eating up all my space.

But I can definitely symphathize with feeling like there's a need to fill up all that vast space. I've definitely come close to using all of the 149 GB on my drive at times - I completely filled a 140 GB partition once (which caused Hibernate to start acting wonky) and smaller ones many times. I'm hoping it takes a bit longer to fill up a 500 GB one when I do buy one (or 640 GB if they're out by then!), but the 60 GB of movies might be going back on then.