Does anyone remember a time when a five gigabyte hard drive was enough? I suppose back then, all we ever did was the most mundane of tasks. A little word processing, checking the odd email and a little sol.exe to fill the gaps between page loads.

I find myself requiring bigger hard drives, on a frequent basis now. As the months pass, I do more and more work, and add to the hard drive. I am an unorganized person; my 'Pending Transfer' directory seems to accumulate all the little collections of misfits awaiting either dumping into a relevant directory or adding to the ever growing archive. Then, there's the multimedia library, that I cherish so much. It contains everything, from every single chart single from 1952 - present, to any TV series I've gotten into. Instead of sticking a DVD in the player, I rip the recording on to the computer and effectively archive the DVD - I'm lazy like that. It's funny really, I'm not actually listening to anything right now...

..So now after this effective 'jump cut' to a time where I am listening to music, I suppose I should tell you what I'm listening to...

..It's a radio station that I've produced for a game modification for Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. It will reiterate my point; I keep all my source files and every single save as a separate backup - in case I make what's effectively called a 'Zell' now. The radio station is 42.5MB in size as a compressed MP3, plus there's 13 previous versions, images, indents, positioning statements, effects, studio voice recordings for the 'DJ' fillings, fake radio commercial recordings, scripts and promotional artwork (a radio station needs posters, right?). Not to mention all the 'ready-to-import' game textures. So that's 5.44GB right there, I'll archive that later.

As you probably know by now, I mod, edit, tweak and design games in my spare time, so the Game section on the Archive is pretty hefty. Then, there's my personal documents, which account for just over 11 gigabytes.

So, before this turns into a catalog of my hard drive contents, I'll continue. We seem to have a bigger and bigger demand for 'space' as time passes. Is it down to us using bigger programs like Adobe's CS4 suite, HD movies, music, or; is it down to 'space abuse', where we get a terabyte of raw space and get careless? I'd say it's a little of both. I know, having loads of multimedia; that that part is certainly true. Well, for me it is. And you've probably worked out that I'm a space abuser. I seem to archive everything. I still have PSDs for work I did 5 years ago.

It seems to me that this isn't just a one off explosion. As time goes by, our 'space demand' will only increase. Applications will get bigger, documents will get bigger, and keeping in theme of the increase, my music library will follow it's HDD cohabitants...

Can the companies that supply these cyber storerooms keep up with our need for cyber warehouses? I think they can. It seems we have a new space race on our hands, one that will never be won...


Last Edit: Jul 3, 2011 17:51:36 GMT by Chris