Comments on: Fujitsu to make bigger “fast” laptop drives http://www.kgadams.net/2008/03/24/fujitsu-to-make-bigger-fast-laptop-drives Technology, computer games, MMOGs, science...and other nerdy stuff Sat, 17 May 2008 17:00:29 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5 By: Kelly Adams http://www.kgadams.net/2008/03/24/fujitsu-to-make-bigger-fast-laptop-drives#comment-17486 Kelly Adams Tue, 25 Mar 2008 04:37:24 +0000 http://www.kgadams.net/2008/03/24/fujitsu-to-make-bigger-fast-laptop-drives#comment-17486 Since the machine in question is a MacBook Pro which runs OS X, I really can't thank Vista for that ;) Actually, although it is stylish these days to blame Vista for pretty much everything, the truth is I have one Vista based computer in the house. And three XP based systems, one Linux based server, and a Macintosh (BSD Unix with a funky graphical layer on top). I have vast quantities of disk capacity for several reasons, not the least of which is that it almost obscenely cheap. I have a lot of photographs, for one thing: 20 gigabytes worth, at least. I also have an appetite for computer games: typically 20-30 GB per machine. Then there are music files: another 10+ GB. Various productivity applications and development tools account for another 10-20 GB. And of course backups: Vista's backup and Mac's Time Machine. Add to this the fact that I hate seeing my hard drives more than about 50% full... and the capacity numbers rapidly become very large, even if actual consumed storage is much less. And I'll skip entirely talking about *useful* stored information ;) I have 300 GB on my main desktop machine, plus 750 GB for its backup. Then I have another 500 GB on my Linux server, and 120 GB internal plus a 500 GB external drive for my MacBook, and a 1 terabyte (1000 GB) drive on my Macintosh Time Capsule... plus a couple of 250 GB drives that I keep around for various shared storage purposes. That comes to something like three and a half terabytes of storage, give or take: call it four terabytes, if you count the storage in my secondary computers and spare hard drives. My total home storage capacity translates to approximately 0.25 LoC*, which is a size I never could have imagined having in my house 20 years ago. <i>* Libraries of Congress, counting just the books- total size of the LoC is roughly estimated at 20 million books or 20 terabytes of written information, but probably more like 3 petabytes of total information including audio, images, and movies. See also <a href="http://www.lesk.com/mlesk/ksg97/ksg.html" rel="nofollow">How much information is there in the world?</a> which, although a decade old, still gives some nice comparisons.</i> Since the machine in question is a MacBook Pro which runs OS X, I really can’t thank Vista for that ;) Actually, although it is stylish these days to blame Vista for pretty much everything, the truth is I have one Vista based computer in the house. And three XP based systems, one Linux based server, and a Macintosh (BSD Unix with a funky graphical layer on top).

I have vast quantities of disk capacity for several reasons, not the least of which is that it almost obscenely cheap. I have a lot of photographs, for one thing: 20 gigabytes worth, at least. I also have an appetite for computer games: typically 20-30 GB per machine. Then there are music files: another 10+ GB. Various productivity applications and development tools account for another 10-20 GB. And of course backups: Vista’s backup and Mac’s Time Machine. Add to this the fact that I hate seeing my hard drives more than about 50% full… and the capacity numbers rapidly become very large, even if actual consumed storage is much less. And I’ll skip entirely talking about *useful* stored information ;)

I have 300 GB on my main desktop machine, plus 750 GB for its backup. Then I have another 500 GB on my Linux server, and 120 GB internal plus a 500 GB external drive for my MacBook, and a 1 terabyte (1000 GB) drive on my Macintosh Time Capsule… plus a couple of 250 GB drives that I keep around for various shared storage purposes. That comes to something like three and a half terabytes of storage, give or take: call it four terabytes, if you count the storage in my secondary computers and spare hard drives.

My total home storage capacity translates to approximately 0.25 LoC*, which is a size I never could have imagined having in my house 20 years ago.

* Libraries of Congress, counting just the books- total size of the LoC is roughly estimated at 20 million books or 20 terabytes of written information, but probably more like 3 petabytes of total information including audio, images, and movies. See also How much information is there in the world? which, although a decade old, still gives some nice comparisons.

]]> By: Chris http://www.kgadams.net/2008/03/24/fujitsu-to-make-bigger-fast-laptop-drives#comment-17480 Chris Tue, 25 Mar 2008 00:31:00 +0000 http://www.kgadams.net/2008/03/24/fujitsu-to-make-bigger-fast-laptop-drives#comment-17480 You can thank Vista for that... by the time you take the operating system and all it's do dads. the space it wants to work in, Office, and of course the really efficient Vista auto back up system that eats drive space, you have to really think that the first 150GB of your hard drive are used up. And 1GB of ram is really the minimum to run Vista, and even then it bogs down. You really need 2 GB minimum and to purr along I suspect you'd want 4, which means a 64 bit system. The downside is a lot pf people were sold crippled laptops because they had an operating system that the machine couldn't handle - the bright side is the manufacturers are having to come up with new er higher performance laptop hardware. You can thank Vista for that… by the time you take the operating system and all it’s do dads. the space it wants to work in, Office, and of course the really efficient Vista auto back up system that eats drive space, you have to really think that the first 150GB of your hard drive are used up. And 1GB of ram is really the minimum to run Vista, and even then it bogs down. You really need 2 GB minimum and to purr along I suspect you’d want 4, which means a 64 bit system.

The downside is a lot pf people were sold crippled laptops because they had an operating system that the machine couldn’t handle - the bright side is the manufacturers are having to come up with new er higher performance laptop hardware.

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