When Target had 1TB external drives on the cheap on Black Friday, I thought to myself "I'm never going to need that much space" and "Who needs that kind of storage space?!?!"

Guess I know who now.

I'm at 150GB and only have about 1/3 of it full of music. I'm a happy girl.
[Reply]

I haven't had any issues whatsoever and the new platters work really well.
I was able to get tons of crap off of my boot drive, and that really helped.
I still have to set up Acronis cause I keep forgetting. Every time it gives me an error, I dismiss it cause I'm too busy. I need to get it done before I have a massive wreck. I just need to set it to do incrementals cause I did all the manual backups already. :-)
[Reply]

1x250GB Windows Drive
1x250GB Cache drive (downloads, disposable files)
2x1TB WD RE3 Enterprise drives in RAID 1
1x320GB External backup in a fire safe

1.5 TB's roughly when you eliminate redundancy.
[Reply]

Hey Rudy,

My media server is actually an old HP desktop that would have been TRP'ed and thrown in the garbage put in a new case with a new power supply :-) I added some drives, loaded Debian 5 (ie. lenny) onto it, installed nfs/samba/lvm, made a big lun, configured sharing and called it a day. I use a Popcorn Hour A-100, which is Linux or FreeBSD based, to stream the video over a wireless-N bridge to my theatre setup so I don't need anything particularly fancy in terms of server software. I've also heard that Windows Home Server (based off W2K3 Standard) works very well for aggregating drives into large storage volumes, plus it'll manage automated backups for up to 10 workstations including wake-on-lan so that might be worth looking at too.

LVM stands for Logical Volume Manager, it's basically JBOD at the software level in instead of in the BIOS or on an onboard sata raid controller. Obviously no redundancy or parity, but for saved video I don't really care..... family video is stored on the fileserver, the media server is just for TV and movies. LVM is amazingly easy to setup, I can fire you some HOWTO's if you want. I don't even bother making backups of the server's OS itself (just the NFS and Samba conf files) since it's just a vanilla install of Debian with a couple packages added. The Lenny netinst disc will even detect existing LVM instances during a fresh install and auto-mount them for you so recovery is a snap.
[Reply]

Im old school with a 1998 Compaq 5000 Series.
900MHZ Pentium 2 AMD Athlon
Windows ME (simple and less crashing)
40Gig internal hard drive (my cell phone has almost as much memory)
but
I have a 500 gig external hard drive.
So I'm pretty content with it for now.

My Fiance has a laptop and had to out-do me and she got a 1-Terabyte external on hers. But her laptop is way newer than mine, but mine can run circles around hers as far a speed is concerned.
[Reply]

I have...

1 tb external
1 500 gb external
1 250 gb external

2 500 gb internals on my rig

1 250 gb internal on my dads rig

60 gb on my macbook

and on my self made server I have another 2.5 TB so in total:

5.5 TB + 60 GB.. I dont think I will ever have to buy any more space.
[Reply]

lightweights.

I have over 7TB of level 5 raid. That's just the backup server.


top that.
[Reply]

Sounds like Bill Gate's take on RAM in 1981

"640K ought to be enough for anybody." -- Bill Gates

When you factor in Moore's Law and relate it to hardware storage devices, you'll see how incredibly silly it sounds to think that ~5TB will be enough to suffice indefinitely :-)
[Reply]

pshh... showoff..

Lord knows I'd have at least that if the wife didn't already think I was nuts for having a simple redundant RAID 1TB setup :-)
[Reply]

2 TB on the pc and 500GB on the laptop....enough to last me a lifetime....
[Reply]

Ultimately I'd like to build a battery of servers with all my video content and music on them so I can stream everything anywhere I want. That'll take 100 gb or so jest to get started.
My next upgrade will only get me to about 7tb, but I'm ready for a platform upgrade soon. I'm going to have to start gathering cases and motherboards soon. :-)
[Reply]

:-)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811219034

Just go with a rack and get it over with :-)

16 drive bays should provide you with enough physical drive space.
[Reply]

Currently 350 gb in my HP laptop, 285 in my wife's Acer laptop and 4 external 500gb Seagate external drives, 2 still in the box. I remember when my first HD was 40mb and it would have cost more to replace it than all of my current storage.
[Reply]

Except Bill Gates never said that.
I'm not sure who originally said this nor why it's attributed to Gates, but he's gone on to say:

"I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time."

Anyways, once you start dealing with HD videos, TB is almost quaint in terms of storage space. I currently have about 6TB of disk space on my media center PC and it's running low now (down to about 12% free space). Even storing everything in just 720p (at 6Mbps using AVC/VC1), it's around 2.2GB per 1 hour show. Flip that to 1080p at 12Mbps, and it's 4.4 to 4.5GB per hour (and 12Mbps for 1080p is kind of on the low side--most of the time I'm seeing around 15 to 18Mbps).

I'm waiting for the big UEFI push before jumping onto the >2TB harddrives for my systems. I should be able to drop around 12TB into each of my file servers at that point.
[Reply]

You can tell yourself that all you want :-)
[Reply]

Mark knows stuff! :-)
[Reply]

I got over 1TB total
[Reply]

I don't have to.
My Google-fu is strong and doing a quick search shows it's correct.
[Reply]

I'll put it to you this way. There's nothing out there credible that says he did say it, and nothing out there credible that says he didn't (other than him saying he didn't like 10+ years later). Leave it up to your imagination. Personally I'd like to think the richest man in the world is human and makes mistakes like the rest of us, even moronic ones.
[Reply]

Hard to believe he's the richest man in the world, isn't it?
He doesn't seem to even much care, and he gives tons away. Pretty good dude, I think. :-)
[Reply]