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The Neverending Search for More Storage Space.

fivepoint

fivepoint

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Sep 28, 2007
1,175
7
IOWA
When my parents got their first mac, it had something like 1GB or storage. "You'll never use that much!" the salesman said. A few documents, games, and years later... the HD was full.

When I got my first mac in 2001, I got a 80GB. It was top-of-the-line for iMacs at that time. "I'll never use that much!" I told myself. Thousands of songs and a few home movies later, the HD was full.

When I got my current iMac (2.8 Extreme, 4gb RAM, 750GB HD) I knew it wouldn't hold my stuff forever (I'm getting smarter apparently) but alas, only a mere 3 months later after picking up DVD ripping as a hobby and starting to seriously go through my family's old home videos, it is almost full again!

I should have seen this coming, and retrospect, probably would have gotten the 1TB model instead, but in all honesty... what would that have bought me? Another three months? As HDs get bigger, the way we use them changes. When I had my last iMac, I would never have dreamed of ripping DVDs. “They’re just way to big!” I would have said… but with over 700 available, I started the quest!

The reason I am writing this is that I know many of you have the exact same problem. I want to know what you all think. It may be kind of a philisophical answer, and it may really be a rhetorical question that isn't really meant for an outright answer... but my question is: Is there any end in sight? Will this not be an issue in the future, or will technology always be right at the cusp of what we need? Will I always have to work around my storage space and change the way I work based on it? Will storage always be the bottleneck of computing?
 
Well, your absolutely right, just when you think you have too much it ends up not being enough. The same could be said in terms of CPU speed. My first PC was a Pentium 133Mhz and the salesman told me that was more than enough and I'll probably never need that much.
Technology grows every day, 10 years ago there was no HDTV in the home and now....we are buying HDMI cables, XBOX 360 to play games on them. You can't expect technology to slow down so you can be happy with the money you spent, it never will.
 
Well, your questions are the reason I went out and bought a Mac Pro today. I can add 4 1TB drives in this beast and all that space will be enough for quite some time. When all four drives do fill up, I can add firewire or even USB drives. I have the entire box set of the X-Files. I had only 4 seasons ripped when I had to give up because my iMac drive was completely full and I still had five seasons to go. Those four seasons took up 30GB so I knew I would need probably 40-50 more GB. I am addicted to my TV shows and movies. My iMac only came with the 320GB HD. When it became full, I bought a LaCie 1TB firewire drive and now it too is half full. I said in another thread yesterday that a person can never have too much disk space and you and I are good examples of that.

My first computer was a 25 MHZ Packard Bell and I believe the HD space was somewhere in the MB range. I remember when a 1TB drive came out and it cost several hundred dollars, that much space was huge back then.

Yes, with my Mac Pro, my storage problems are solved for I hope, a few years :eek:

Oh, another nice benefit (off topic) is that my Mac Pro is ripping one TV show in 10 minutes as compared to 30 or so minutes with a Dual core iMac. This was my second reason to get a Mac Pro :)

Have fun keeping up with disk space, I sort of am!
 
hexonxonx said:
I have the entire box set of the X-Files. I had only 4 seasons ripped when I had to give up because my iMac drive was completely full and I still had five seasons to go.
Click to expand...

I have the same, excellent box set. I just bought a Time Capsule, so I just wish my MacBook could rip them as fast as your Mac Pro. :rolleyes:
 
I edit video professionally, so I never have enough space. 1.5TB worth of raw REDCODE footage on my last project... Lots of filled up external hard drives all over the house with other projects living on them...

Does it ever end?
 
It will never end, and neither will the quest for speed or RAM. Whenever larger storage capacities and faster processors become more affordable, hardware and software vendors will find uses for the new capacity, and we'll all follow along. Compare the disk and memory size of Microsoft Word's early releases (on a floppy disk) to today's monstrous version. Compare the minimum processor requirements of software today compared with 10 years ago.

Display sizes continue to go up as well: 14", 17", 19", 21", 24", 30". This can't go up forever, however, since there's a limit to what people can fit on a desk!
 
I ended up building a cheap PC with a RAID controller in it.
Buying bare 1TB drives isn't terribly expensive these days, and setting up a RAID just isn't that difficult if you get a decent controller.
The server runs headless, in a closet, and is the central vault containing my music collection, my DVD collection, as well as regular backup images.
My next upgrade (probably in the next 6-12 months) will expand my capacity from 1TB to 4TB. Ripped DVDs take up some space, and I expect my hunger for storage to increase exponentially once ripping HD becomes viable. :D
 
mahashel said:
I ended up building a cheap PC with a RAID controller in it.
Buying bare 1TB drives isn't terribly expensive these days, and setting up a RAID just isn't that difficult if you get a decent controller.
The server runs headless, in a closet, and is the central vault containing my music collection, my DVD collection, as well as regular backup images.
My next upgrade (probably in the next 6-12 months) will expand my capacity from 1TB to 4TB. Ripped DVDs take up some space, and I expect my hunger for storage to increase exponentially once ripping HD becomes viable. :D
Click to expand...

Mahashel,
For an iMac, how would this be done? Since it does not have a RAID controller, would I essentially be limited to functional yet relatively expensive products like the drobo?
 
Mahashel,
For an iMac, how would this be done? Since it does not have a RAID controller, would I essentially be limited to functional yet relatively expensive products like the drobo?
Click to expand...
Hmm.. well my solution required building a whole separate system devoted to storage. If you're looking at sticking with a single-system setup, using the iMac, then you're kind of stuck with external drive solutions. The Drobo product you linked to is definitely interesting, and really not that expensive when you're looking at maintaining a whole separate computer dedicated to storage, like I do.
 
The last couple seasons without david dic..... (Mulder) you don't need soo space problem solved:)
 
This effectively provides unlimited storage, it is tray less and inexpensive (about $70). Could be set up for RAID, but that would defeat the unlimited storage feature.

http://www.kingwin.com/product_pages/kf3000-bk.asp

My Powermac G5 only had two SATA connections, so it was spared the hacksaw.

I built a hackintosh to house it instead. Tray 1 houses the boot drive, and I swap in other OS's there for fun too. I use trays 2 and 3 for data. Only limit is how many raw drives I can buy.
 
no end in sight, but i think there's a way of managing it.

i'm waiting until home servers come down in price b/c i need about 8 GBs right now. then, i'll rip my home videos (about 80+ hours) and all my photos.

To manage it, i think i'll have one solution for my personal stuff and then one for media (music, movies).
 
fivepoint said:
Mahashel,
For an iMac, how would this be done? Since it does not have a RAID controller, would I essentially be limited to functional yet relatively expensive products like the drobo?
Click to expand...

No, you can use Software Raid thru Apple's Disk Utility or buy SoftRaid (I use it and it's excellent).

http://softraid.com/

I also do DVD ripping and have more than 4TB of disks. Too much to backup so I use RAID1 (mirroring) to protect myself.
 
merl1n said:
No, you can use Software Raid thru Apple's Disk Utility or buy SoftRaid (I use it and it's excellent).

http://softraid.com/

I also do DVD ripping and have more than 4TB of disks. Too much to backup so I use RAID1 (mirroring) to protect myself.
Click to expand...

Now we're getting somewhere! I like where this is going... does anyone have experience with Apple Software RAID through Disk Utility? Are there any down-falls of it? All I need to get started is two formatted HD's, right?
 
If you think its bad trying to get enough storage space, try doing it when you need that space to be portable! I live in a truck(semi, not pickup), the more DVD's I rip the more room I have for other things, like food. 1Tb is starting to look small right now...
 
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