How big a hard disk do you need?

David Dorn, wowed by Maxtor’s 320GB drive announcement, wonders what you’d do with one!

Every so often I get a press release that drops me straight into “when I were a lad” mode – and this MaxLine series of Hard Disk Drives has done just that. I mean, 320GigaBytes – that’s, that’s… it’s HUGE!!!!

When I were a lad, you were lucky if you had a 320 MEGAByte sized hard disk. In fact, the first 386-based PC I bought was, at the time, a power-user machine, and it had two 60Megabyte drives in it that cost me one arm, one leg and one half of those bits that shall remain nameless.

That, of course, was then. This is now, and things have changed a tad. Only last week, I took delivery of a Fostex VF160, which is a 16-channel direct to hard disk recording unit. It ships with a 20Gig drive in it. Sony even has car radios that have 20Gig drives in them for copying CDs to so you can listen to a very large compilation while you’re driving. (No I haven’t got one… yet!)

Neither of these two bits of kit are what you’d call PC related, really, even if their functionality has been derived as a function of the PC marketplace.

Bigger is better

On my main PC, though, I’ve got a 30Gig hard disk, which I’m looking to upgrade fairly shortly. It gets some hammer, and is rarely less than half full. In fact, I’ve noticed, now, that I’m fast running out of space for video editing – I can’t get a full one hour Mini-DV tape digitised on what’s left of the free space on the drive.

So, a drive that’s ten times the size might be a good idea. With RAM, I usually advise anyone that asks that there’s no such thing as too much (unless we’re talking Windows Millennium and the 512MB limit for RAM, of course).

The same can be said of Hard Disk Space – you can never really have too much, but you can easily find yourself with not enough.

Now, these 320Gig drives (which are not quite yet available in the UK) look set to retail at around the £400 mark when they’re available – which you can expect to drop reasonably sharpish. Of course, their arrival in the shops will drop the price on lesser capacity drives pretty soon, too, so you’ll be able to bung some pretty hefty drives into your PC for not a lot of money real soon now.

Competition

What I want to know is this – outside of a networking in business environment, in which multiple concurrent users need lots of disk space, which home user will be the first to fill one of thses monsters?

I’m sorely tempted to put up a prize for the first owner to prove that he or she has filled a 320Gig drive legitimately, and not just with huge temporary files. By filled, I mean to within 5% of its capacity, excluding the Windows swap and paging files – a truly full hard disk will kill a PC, you see.

There’s a spindle of 80Meg CD-Rs awaiting the winner! You’ll need ’em to back the thing up!

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David Dorn