...but how much is a GB anyway?
Mar 04 '00
These days, the capacity of hard drives has increased such that any cheap commercial drive will supply you with all the space you'll ever need, in most cases. Just two years ago, a 2GB drive was more or less standard, and a 6GB drive was considered HUGE. Today, the smallest commercially available drive is 8GB or so, and probably 6 months from now you won't find anything smaller than 13GB...
Apart from the fact that hard drive space is now getting quite cheap - 8GB will set you back less than $150 - most people do not have the slightest idea of what Gigabytes of drive space come down to. So here are a few practical tidbits that may help you choosing the proper size of hard drive for your machine, whether you're buying a new one or upgrading an older computer.
One GB of hard drive space will hold:
-- About 4,000 full screen (1024 x 768) high quality JPEG images, or
-- Something like 200 average MP3s, or
-- 40,000 average pages of Portable Document Format (.pdf) files, or
-- 125,000 average epinions.com reviews in plain text format.
This means that the smallest average hard drive you'll find on most new computers - about 8GB - will supply you with all the space you'll ever need unless you have a huge collection of MP3s and you want all of these on your hard drive at all times, or unless you have very particular requirements.
More traditional file types - text, word processor documents, spreadsheets and data bases - will take up very little space on today's hard drives.
Graphic files may be large, a scan of a 4" x 6" color photograph at 1,200dpi resolution may be as large as 100MB, but unless you'll be working with it - which probably means you're into graphics at a professional level, and have a pretty awesome machine - you'll store your scanned photographs in JPEG format which takes up a lot less space, and you'll not be using such a high resolution anyway. At 300dpi, the original scan will be about 8MB, and in excellent quality JPEG format you're down to 400 - 500kB or so, which means you can store more than 2,000 of such photographs on 1GB of disk space.
Games may be a problem. Some of the most recent games really take up a huge amount of disk space. But if you are a hardcore gamer, you'll need a pretty awesome machine anyway: Nothing takes more of everything - disk space, processor power, memory - than games. Bit silly, eh... What do we do with today's spearhead technology...? Shoot-em-ups!
Now keep in mind that, if you are running Win98, you'll need about 700Mb for your operating system and related files. Add up 1GB or so for the programs you want to install - which means you have a large enough safety margin, I have a HUGE amount of programs installed and they take up about 800MB - and another 300MB for your word processor documents, spreadsheets, etc. All this adds up to 2GB.
This means that with today's average drive, you have 6GB available for your media files or games. Unless you really have lots of MP3s and/or AVIs or you are a hardcore gamer, this will be quite sufficient. Opting for a 13GB drive nearly doubles the available space, at an additional cost of maybe $50. So if you want to be on the safe side, go for it. But more than 16GB of hard drive space really does not make much sense: Consider that you'll probably be upgrading to a newer machine within three years. Spend some more money on additional RAM instead, as this will result in a noticeable increase of your machine's performance - unless you've already got more than 128MB fitted.
Besides, if you eventually find that you're getting short on hard drive space, you can always add a second drive if you need to, at a moderate cost and with a few added benefits. Particularly when fitted in a removable plug-in unit. But that's another story...
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