Look At My Big...Hard Drive!
Oct 10 '00
There are only a handful of computer-user categories, and depending on which one you fall into determines the size hard drive you'll need:
1. Computer Gamer: You spend big bucks for the games, and you're up to date on the latest in hardware. You spend $50 a month in gaming magazines. You have no social life outside of LAN parties.
2. Housewife Jane/In-Between Jobs Bob: You have a lot of time on your hands once "Days of Our Live" is over, so you visit cute little pages in search of pastry recipes. You hang out in chatrooms, perhaps pretending to be a 12 year old girl named Rhonda. Or maybe you just like to write emails to grandma and play the occasional game of Freecell (**shudder**)
3. High School/College Student: You wish you had time for computer games, but your parents invested thousands in your education. You use your computer for nothing more than writing term papers. If in high school you try to hide your collection of pornography in an obscure folder you call "C:/letterstograndma/books/neatplaces/tatas1".
4. At Work: Such a shame, you use your Pentium 900 with 256mb of RAM for storing memos, business letters, etc. (and hiding pornography from your boss).
These days, the price per megabyte of hard drives is so low you could store the contents of the Library of Congress on a budget of under $100. Prices for storage can range from say $100 to $3000 or so, depending on size and whether or not the hard drive is SCSI (if you don't know what that means, don't worry about it). The smallest hard drive I can buy from my wholesaler at this point is 8.4 Gigabytes. Back in 1992 when I was a senior in College (go hokies!!) having a 1 gig drive was a huge deal. But with today's games taking upwards of 1 gig by themselves, larger storage is mandatory. Still, there is no need to spend too much money if you don't have the need for warehouse sized drives.
1A: You are a gamer, and you have some bucks. For between $150 and $250, you can find a fast 20-40GB hard drive by a name brand manufacturer that will hold dozens of games like "Soldier of Fortune" or "Quake 3". "Diablo 2" takes over a gig by itself, for cryin out loud!
2A: You use your computer for chatting, the occasional letter or printing out some documents. Text files are very small. 8 gigs or so is plenty, and you can always back-up your files on a floppy or zip disk.
3A: If you're a student, sooner or later you'll be free from the shackles of education, and able to install games etc. on to your hard drives. For the time being, 8 to 10 gigs is plenty, considering most projects at college are still text-based term papers. If you're into graphics/video, etc., then a larger drive would be prudent.
4A: At work, the bosses decide the specs of your computer (I would think). If you have any input at all, and if the files you create at work are extremely important, suggest to the company that they use a RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks) setup. Basically this is a large mass of several hard drives--each drive has the same files on it as the others, in case another drive fails. Smaller corporations could probably be content with setting up each employee with a basic computer with 8-15 gigs of space. Once again this is all depends on the type of profession you're in.
For the most part the size...of your hard drive, is a personal matter. If you can afford bigger, make the "adjustment". If you want to save the bucks, buy only what you need. Typically people show off their drives only if they have big ones. Some people on the other hand are quite content with their small ones, simply because it gets the job done. That's all that matters anyway!
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Epinions.com ID:
infielderx
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Member: David Bragg
Location: Frederick, Md
Reviews written: 145
Trusted by: 24 members
About Me:
31 year old Pizza franchisee (what a mistake!) and computer geek.
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