Have We Exceeded Our Computer Storage Needs?

24 TB on my desktop, few hundred GB free. A few external hard drives full. Planning on expanding further.
 
The funny thing about storage is the more I have, the more I use. Even so, I could use more storage.as I want to get into video projects in HD and that uses a ton of space. I also make sure all of my online content is downloaded locally as I don't want to have to rely on an outside source to watch my movies or listen to my music. Still, better than being stuck on a 120GB drive like around 2003. I was always running out of space on that.
 
there was a time when I needed more, but today I need not that much. after given up on storing everything, I lost my data in accidents to many times. I use about 1tb hdd, one 500gb ssd and 1 256gb pcie ssd.
 
Flogger23m said:
Not for me. Main thing I am waiting for is SSD prices to be near HDD prices. 3TB is a good amount, especially with the size of modern games. But it is still $150 for only 500GB of space on an SSD. We have a long way to go.
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I don't see SSD prices ever getting near HDD prices. Unless HDDs die out completely. If they'd cost nearly the same nobody would buy spinning drives, so the HDD manufacturers will make sure they always have a nice price advantage. And if that's no longer possible then they'll just stop making HDDs.
 
Seeing that currently there is a 10x price difference in favor of HDDs if you want big storage. I think the lowest that ever be is 2x. But not for many years to come.
 
Have they stopped making porn? Have women stopped having sex on camera for money? No? Then I'm going to keep needing more and bigger hard drives thank you very much.
 
Also don't tell me there's streaming. I don't want to see grainy VHS quality shit. It's 2016. I want my porn in HD or 4K.
 
I am OK. 750GB of SSD and 4TB of normal storage. About 30% capacity. I stopped hoarding useless stuff.
 
The largest amount I ever had on my computer at one time was 450GB... What I want to see is 128GB of Vram on a graphic card. Those Hynix guys were able to get that much ram on a single stick.
 
Saying you have enough storage is like saying you've had enough sex. Sure, you may be ok today. But there's always tomorrow and who knows what kind of new stuff you'll need to try next week.
 
I really don't get tying yourself down with loads of digital data.

I possibly have a total of 1TB of data spread across a couple of NAS and machines.

In terms of what I would really want to keep or thats important?

Maybe 20GB worth.

On the machines I work on I keep very little data on them. Don't see the point or liability of taking all my data mobile.
 
12TB in RAID-6 (4x WD Red Pro 6TB). I'm currently around 25% full, but have a bunch of BluRay movies and TV shows to rip yet for HTPC access. Thanks to my Synology DS1815+, I still have 4 empty bays available plus the ability to add two extenders if needed for a total of 96TB (if I only use and expand one volume in RAID-6).

I've already had one internal drive fail (Seagate Barricuda 3TB) before owning a NAS, and was fortunately able to salvage the data before complete failure. I was also fortunate to be able to shuffle that data around to other drives, but I have a sneaking suspicion that another of my external drives will eventually fail in the near-term.

This is also used to back up my work laptop. I am barely in the office (less than a dozen times per year) which is 3 hours away from where I do pretty much all of my work (HVAC controls), so I'd rather be just screwed if something on my work laptop fails as long as I don't lose any data (I'd rather spend the time moving the data back to the laptop instead of having to rebuild it with much older data, assuming the data is on our company file server).
 
blitzkommando said:
The funny thing about storage is the more I have, the more I use. Even so, I could use more storage.as I want to get into video projects in HD and that uses a ton of space. I also make sure all of my online content is downloaded locally as I don't want to have to rely on an outside source to watch my movies or listen to my music. Still, better than being stuck on a 120GB drive like around 2003. I was always running out of space on that.
Click to expand...

This^^
Its always the case that the more in system space I have the less I am forced to archive to discs (bd) and the less I delete. I can retain note inteediate iterations of projects (video, audio and 3D modelling and animations) it make it nice when I want to use a price of an older project in a n4w one or use an old version. I have 246 tb now and could find a way to fill up twice that.
 
I ahve around 15TB in my PC and its 85% full.

HDDs are still stupid expensive (per TB) - prices (per TB) are effectively same as 5 years ago - if they were cheaper I would have at least 2 extra 4TB HDDs.
 
though not mine, I did assemble and configure this system for a digital forensics firm about a year ago.

8U 48-bay chasis
3x Areca ARC-1264IL-16
Originally they wanted hardware RAID which we set up as 3 RAID 10 arrays of 16 WD40EFRX each. Then they changed their mind to btrfs RAID 10 instead of hardware RAID 10.
So, 96 TB
 
I once managed a storage system with a petabyte of storage. My personal array is 24TB total 12TB effective as it is setup for high speed read/writes. I am in the process of building a new personal storage NAS with 32TB in an ultraquiet mini-box.
 
For Joe Average, yes. For anyone like us - probably not. Always can have more. Whether it's music, video, 4K video, PDF's, pictures, games, whatever... We will get more, and the file size will increase.

At one time, my Flight Simulator folder itself was around 1TB will all the add-on's and such in there.
 
Cmdrmonkey said:
Also don't tell me there's streaming. I don't want to see grainy VHS quality shit. It's 2016. I want my porn in HD or 4K.
Click to expand...

4K streaming video is available on Netflix, Amazon and others. I'm told House Of Cards looks fantastic in 4K on Netflix. You do need Internet service that can consistently deliver 20 Mbps, which can certainly be challenging to find in much of the US.

There's also 4K streaming porn sites too, if you meant that seriously, but I'll let you Google those yourself.
 
My primary desktop has 10TB online.
My main HTPC has 3TB.
My secondary HTPC has 2TB.
My UnRAID server has 40TB + 4TB parity drive and 1TB cache drive.
 
evilsofa said:
4K streaming video is available on Netflix, Amazon and others. I'm told House Of Cards looks fantastic in 4K on Netflix. You do need Internet service that can consistently deliver 20 Mbps, which can certainly be challenging to find in much of the US.

There's also 4K streaming porn sites too, if you meant that seriously, but I'll let you Google those yourself.
Click to expand...

4K Netflix looks fantastic, for the most part, and I haven't regretted purchasing my Roku 4 for a moment. Ditto for Amazon Prime videos -- MitHC looks wonderful.

My only real gripe against 4K so far has been Jessica Jones -- the encoding on it quite frankly sucks. I suspect this may be because the process that was used to film it intentionally aimed for a "gritty", "grainy" look to the video. Unfortunately, this tends to either lead to insanely high bitrates or horrendous macro-blocks being visible when you try encoding it at its native resolution. Encoding it at 1080 or 720 effectively acted like running it through a low pass filter that got rid of a lot of the graininess -- which yielded much better encoding. Great show though.
 
There are 2 classes of users, those that need a lot of space, or want it and those that don't. And not a ton of people fall in the middle anymore. Almost all the people that need a lot of space are working with media of some sort and just piling it onto drives or have some sort of hoarding mentality. For everyone else 1Tb will handle almost everything they could ever do and even SSDs are now shipping in that capacity at acceptable prices. A couple games (uninstall ones you don't play anymore) office, windows, a ton of photos and some family videos.
 
rudy said:
Almost all the people that need a lot of space are working with media of some sort and just piling it onto drives or have some sort of hoarding mentality.
Click to expand...

Media does take a good amount of my 48TB, but a decent amount are disk images as well.
 
Zarathustra[H];1042114589 said:
Media does take a good amount of my 48TB, but a decent amount are disk images as well.
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Ditto.

I have a huge # of disk images for basically every model of machine I support that I have deployed in the field. I also have pretty much every ISO and file download from my MSDN Universal and Technet subscriptions since the mid-90's (i.e. every MS OS, Office, Visual Studio, Library, etc) -- which actually get used more than you might imagine (e.g. I had to bring back up a Win 98 machine for testing back in the fall). I also keep archival system images for pretty much every development machine configuration I've ever had to set up -- in case I have to rebuild the project in the future (many of which have been virtualized and converted over to OVA files). Then add in 20 years worth of Linux distributions and what amounts to a huge chunk of the mainline kernel GIT (plus numerous forks -- like Freescale's, etc).

I do have a ton of media on there too, but it's probably less than half of my total usage.
 
I sit at 20 TB. Using about 15 TB of it. I don't really need the storage, but well, I like having easier access to my crap. I buy a dvd/bluray/cd/etc, I instantly rip it and toss it on my file server. It's a mix of videos, games, music, software, pictures, etc

I'm planning to upgrade to 24 TB RAID 5 setup this year. I seem to be doing fine around 20 TB. I can always use more storage, but with how much I randomly clean up my files, I can keep myself at the 20 TB line without being annoyed.
 
21tb on a raidz2. 27tb total storage on my desktop.

... I don't really need to delete stuff ever.
 
This system has worked pretty well for me for the last year and a half:

Code: 
	NAME
	zfshome
	  raidz2-0
	    WD RED 4TB
	    WD RED 4TB
	    WD RED 4TB
	    WD RED 4TB
	    WD RED 4TB
	    WD RED 4TB
	  raidz2-1
	    WD RED 4TB
	    WD RED 4TB
	    WD RED 4TB
	    WD RED 4TB
	    WD RED 4TB
	    WD RED 4TB
	logs
	  mirror-2
	    Intel S3700 SSD 100GB
	    Intel S3700 SSD 100GB
	cache
	  stripe-3
	    Samsung SSD 850 Pro 128GB
	    Samsung SSD 850 Pro 128GB
Code: 
NAME      SIZE  ALLOC   FREE  EXPANDSZ   FRAG    CAP  DEDUP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
zfshome  43.6T  31.5T  12.0T         -    15%    72%  1.00x  ONLINE  /mnt

Lately I have been considering adding a third RAIDz2 vdev of drives. I had to go cleaning out some old stuff I didn't need the other day in order to clear up some space to get it down to 72% capacity.
 
Zarathustra[H];1042115659 said:
This system has worked pretty well for me for the last year and a half:

Code: 
	NAME
	zfshome
	  raidz2-0
	    WD RED 4TB
	    WD RED 4TB
	    WD RED 4TB
	    WD RED 4TB
	    WD RED 4TB
	    WD RED 4TB
	  raidz2-1
	    WD RED 4TB
	    WD RED 4TB
	    WD RED 4TB
	    WD RED 4TB
	    WD RED 4TB
	    WD RED 4TB
	logs
	  mirror-2
	    Intel S3700 SSD 100GB
	    Intel S3700 SSD 100GB
	cache
	  stripe-3
	    Samsung SSD 850 Pro 128GB
	    Samsung SSD 850 Pro 128GB
Code: 
NAME      SIZE  ALLOC   FREE  EXPANDSZ   FRAG    CAP  DEDUP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
zfshome  43.6T  31.5T  12.0T         -    15%    72%  1.00x  ONLINE  /mnt

Lately I have been considering adding a third RAIDz2 vdev of drives. I had to go cleaning out some old stuff I didn't need the other day in order to clear up some space to get it down to 72% capacity.
Click to expand...

Personally, I prefer UnRAID over a RAIDZ2 setup (on FreeNAS, etc). UnRAID is much easier to grow (just add a new disk and let it recalc parity) and for most purposes a single parity drive works out fine -- and since everything is handled at the file system level and each drive can be read individually, you don't have to worry about catastrophic failures causing you to lose the entire array (you only lose those drives that have failed). And, in the case where a given drive started developing bad sectors during a rebuild, I've been able to mount the failing volume itself in recovery mode, read everything I could, and just ignore the bad data -- with the result that I had a few corrupted files, but the rest was recoverable. That said, I have offline backups of everything on my server too.
 
Megalith said:
I have two 5TB drives on backorder, so I’m going to have to go with no. What is the biggest amount of storage you have ever had in a single system?

There was a time when computer users were concerned about not having enough hard disk space on their computers. Moore’s Law says the semiconductor chip density will double every 18 months yet computer storage capacity growth has outpaced even that rate. Recently I have witnessed that many people do not use anywhere near their computer’s hard disk storage. Computer manufacturers now offer storage capacity of 500GB, 1TB and beyond. It is beginning to feel like we don’t need quite that much.
Click to expand...

One I own, about 1.5TB.

One my company owns and I take care of, about half a petabyte.
 
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