Data Storage

Image "borrowed" from Western Digital

Well, I've finally hit the point where I need at least One Terabyte of hard drive space!

Yesterday, I went to my local Best Buy and purchased a 500 GB external hard drive. I was amazed that I was able to get this for only $199. Prices seem to be dropping all the time on hard drives!

Together with my other external hard drives and my internal drive, I now have about One Terabyte of storage space! Prior to this purchase, I had been storing a lot of my files on DVD-R discs. With the low prices on hard drives now, I can just keep everything on a drive and just use the DVD-R discs for backup. So I spent yesterday consolidating the files on my other external drives and moved all the photo images to the new drive. You know what? That 500 GB drive is now filled to 92 percent already! But I freed up the space on the other two external drives because of doing this.

I remember when buying a computer with a 20 mb hard drive was considered huge! And at that time, getting a machine with 64kb of RAM was pretty good too. 80286 machines were all the rage back then and owning an IBM XT computer was the high-end of computers! Times have changed...

Today with the large files generated by digital cameras, not to mention the quantity of images I take on a given Saturday, I can easily fill up a hard drive in no time. I need lots of storage space for my work. But at least this is much easier than storing film negatives! What a pain that used to be!

Most likely in the next few months, I'll be in the market for another 500 GB hard drive. But by that time, I'll bet it will either be cheaper or I'll be able to get more space for the same price. What a deal!