Don't Be Seduced By Drive SizeJan 10 '08 (Updated Aug 11 '09) Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line To go faster is a good reason for choosing a large-capacity drive. But, buying bigger for bigger's sake is not a good reason!
If you ask the everyday computer user about hard drive size, more often than not, the answer you would most expect to hear would be, "bigger is better." Indeed, if the cost of an 120-gigabyte (GB) hard drive equals or is close to the price of a 160 GB drive, you would be remiss if you opted for the drive with the lower capacity. In today's world of computers and consumer electronics, one of the great marketing ploys is to focus on drive size and/or the presence of a whatever-sized hard drive; laptops can boast 240 GB hard drives, iPods are 80 GBs and higher, run-of-the-mill mp3 players are pushing past 8 GB, and even Cadillacs feature 80 GB hard drives for your music-listening convenience. Hard drives with greater storage capacity are en vogue... Or, are they...? This morning, as I sat in front of my Windows XP-powered desktop computer with the 40 GB hard drive and 3 GHz Pentium 4 CPU (which is two or three years old), I began thinking about hard drive space and how necessary it is. Now, I would be absolutely foolish to dismiss the wonderful convenience of having lots of drive space for music and video files, games, applications, and (as time goes by) for bloatware operating systems that require a minimum of 15 GB just to install them (I'm looking at you, Vista!). But, I grow more and more alarmed with each passing day at how consumers (we are no longer human beings, but consumers!) are lured into replacing a perfectly-functional mp3 player to acquire a bigger one to hold more songs. It is from this personal state of alarmed-ness that I write this article, hoping to dissuade you, the reader, from being seduced by greater storage capacity when it is, at least now, not that necessary... When Large Hard Drives Make Sense Don't get me wrong: hard drives (whether internal or external) with immense storage capacity have their uses. Businesses often require servers that can service hundreds or thousands of employees and back up all of those workers' files. Photographers need storage space for photos, especially enthusiasts and professionals who work in RAW and TIFF formats. Musicians and producers needs loads of space for WAV files. Oh, and even avid gamers need some 2-8 GB of drive space PER GAME, so I understand their need for space. In all of these instances, drive space serves a purpose and cannot be reasonably underestimated. When Large Hard Drives Do Not Make Sense Recently, I was talking to a co-worker who received an 80 GB iPod for Christmas. Now, this thing was snazzy: while viewing the very sharp color monitor, my coworker could virtually flip through album covers and find the desired item. This iPod also played video and cooked eggs; it was amazing (except for the eggs part, which is a lie). But, the more I looked at that iPod, the more I wondered: how many albums would it take to fill that thing up?! Well, I went back to my desk and called up Windows' Calculator and did some raw calculating. Let's say that the average mp3 song file is about 4 megabytes (MB), or about 1 MB per minute; on an 80 GB iPod (and assuming that it is truly 80 GB and not less based on Windows' calcuation of hard drive space), that means that you could store 250 songs per 1 GB, or 20,000 songs! If, then, we assume that an average album feature 11 songs, that equals over 1,818 albums!! Who owns that much music? Of course, this iPod was also meant for storing video, but wow! After I disembarked from this train of thought, I pondered how useful those 80 GB truly were on that iPod and I concluded this: most of that storage would either be completely wasted or filled up for the sake of being filled up. Who realistically puts over 1,800 albums on an iPod? Can anyone tell me how long it takes to rip all the songs from an album and then port it to an iPod? Being completely ignorant, I'll take a stab at it: if it take 15 minutes to completely rip a CD's contents and transfer it to an iPod, then it would take 27,000 minutes to complely rip and transfer 1800 albums, which is 450 hours, or 18.75 24-hour days. To just use the entirety of storage space requires a lot of on-computer time! Personally, for the average music listener, recreational picture taker, home-office businessperson, or weekend gamer, large hard drives serve little purpose but to either make those people feel like they got a good deal on a piece of consumer electronics or make them waste that space on totally useless files that could be burned to DVD or saved in cold storage on an external hard drive. How To Address The Non-Necessity of Large Hard Drives With many computers and pieces of electronic equipment that requires storage, manufacturers and retailers often offer a base amount of storage, but also provide options to boost hard drive size. For example, computer makers like Dell and Hewlett-Packard offers laptops with hard drives that start at 80 GB, but you can opt for larger hard drives, if you so choose, at reasonable increases in price. Likewise, Apple and other mp3 player manufacturers offer players of various sizes. Understandably, the temptation to buy bigger drives is there -- after all, if it only costs $25 or so to buy a larger drive, then how can you resist? I say, you have to resist. Nowadays, drive sizes are much larger than anyone can possibly use to maximum capacity and should not necessitate either paying more for a larger drive or buying a new piece of electronics to replace your current item that is half the size. Just because something is now available with more drive space does not mean that the drive space (or even the nifty touch screens, added video capabilities, and so on) is necessary. Also, back in the "Dark Ages", built-in obsolescence meant that something would break down or become outmoded within a preset amount of time; now, built-in obsolescence has come to mean "when a bigger/faster/more nifty item comes out," which often corresponds with the following Christmas time. Don't buy into current perceptions of built-in obsolescence; most of the time, the item you own is perfectly useful in the current technological setting. Even now, I still rock my 512 MB Creative Zen Nano player and I am content with the 10 or so albums I can port into it. One more thing: one of the best trends in technology today is backwards-compatibility which, for hard drives, means that your old storage device is still recognized by current technology. Backwards-compatibility applies to hard drives and items that store files; old hard drives can work with new operating systems, and old mp3 players are still recognized by current computers. This will also be the saving grace of newer technology items like HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players because (and I hope this happens) I don't think people will be duped into swapping out their entire DVD collections (which they painstakingly amassed to replace their VHS tape collections) to get HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs just because you can access more menus or see the hairs in the leading man's nostrils with crystal clarity. Instead, people will retain their DVDs and buy the players to allow for the purpose of purchasing and viewing certain choice movies in the favored medium. Acceptable Reasons for Upgrading Hard Drives If you couldn't tell, I am adamantly against upgrading hard drives and other storage devices strictly to get bigger for bigger's sake. However, I am fully supportive of people who wish to improve system performance to meet the demands of newer software, as well as to further enjoy games, photo editing applications, and the like. In my humble opinion, here are good reasons to upgrade your storage device: * Quicker seek time: if a hard drive or other storage device can signficantly find information faster than your current device, then seriously consider upgrading or augmenting your current device with a faster primary drive. * Faster transfer rates: if you are considering upgrading from a hard drive with an IDE interface (which typically rated 100-133 MB/sec.) to one with an SATA interface (which can rate from 150 MB/sec. for SATA I, or 300 MB/sec. for SATA II), then go for it. A Windows XP machine with a new SATA drive benefits from a good several seconds of gained time from quicker startups. * Greater portability: if you are in the market for a new external hard drive for cold storage, now is a great time to shop for snazzy, tight drives that are USB-powered and can hold as much as some internal hard drives. * Increased compatibility: if you are seeking a device that can handle multiple file formats and bitrates, then finding technology capable of this is not necessarily a bad thing. * Firewire: I am not certain, but if you can get your hands on a Firewire external hard drive, then buy it! The transfer rates are stellar! * Drive space is necessary: if you wish to upgrade from Windows XP to Windows Vista and you have, say, a 40 GB hard drive, you would need to get more space. After all future service packs are released, I can imagine Vista bulking up to 30 GB or so just for the core operating system! Okay, that MAY be a slight exaggeration, but 40 and 60 GB would not be able to handle Vista and all of your favored applications or any appreciable number of music and video files you want. *** In summation, refuse to be duped by manufacturers and don't upgrade your hard drive or storage item until you run it into the ground or really desire better performance in terms of speed and data access from your storage device. To simplify this point: I am fairly certain that those old Diamond Rio mp3 players of yore (which held as little as 64 MB of music files) are still very useful for playing a certain amount of music. Sadly, though, I am also certain that almost all of those Rio owners have since either stored or thrown away those useful mp3 players just to get that bigger mp3 player. The same hold true for hard drives: I'm sure that there are those out there who have let their little 20 GB hard drives go to the wayside as they installed their screaming 240 GB hard drives, even though they run Windows Me. Besides, isn't there an issue with FAT32 and large hard drives..? If so, then the extra space is indeed wasted with 32 KB clusters.  |
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