[Cialug] Big Disks

[Nathan C. Smith]

On the one hand, your price per megabyte is often lower on the larger disks.

My experience is that disks larger than about 300 GB need extra cooling and will reasonably last about 3 years before flaking out. (Samsung, Seagate consumer hard drives)

I can only speak from my experience but go with the lower capacity for longevity.  If space is not a requirement the new Intel SSDs are making a big splash for speed.

-Nate

-----Original Message-----
From: cialug-bounces at cialug.org [mailto:cialug-bounces at cialug.org] On Behalf Of Todd Walton
Sent: Sunday, January 10, 2010 8:32 AM
To: Central Iowa Linux Users Group
Subject: [Cialug] Big Disks

Looking at hard drive prices...  You can get 1 TB for $80!  But what
would you use that much space for?  I have a 300 GB drive with 1) all
my data, 2) a couple hundred digital camera pictures, 3) a couple
hundred low/average quality mp3s, 4) 10 or 12 almost-DVD quality full
length movie mpgs.  And I haven't filled my 300 GB.  I know it's
accepted wisdom that one can never have too much disk space, but,
really, what would I use a terabyte for at home?

Side-by-side disk backups?  You wouldn't be buying much protection.
Multiple OSs?  I suppose you could install 30 or 40 different Unix
distributions for the heck of it.  Serious hobbyist videography is a
reasonable scenario.  Run Solaris and set ZFS to remember everything.
Virtual machine snapshots. Sup8r l33t 500gigz swap holyw0wfast!

The situations in which you'd really use a terabyte seem scarce.  But
what can the extra space hurt, right?  Well I don't know, are there
any drawbacks to larger hard drive sizes?  You certainly would want to
partition it.  Isn't there some statistic about hard drive error rate
going up as hard drive space increases?

--
Todd
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