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.