Not enough space

When I brought my first PC in 1996 (before that I used my mums Mac that she got from work) it had a wopping 6GB hard drive - the man that sold it to me said I would/could NEVER use that much space.

Of all the statements I’ve heard people say, never has one been proved so wrong and in such a short space of time. Within three years I had upgraded to Windows 98 and was already running out of hard disk space - most of it taken up with photos my parents and friends had asked me to scan in and re-touch using photoshop.

It was time for a new computer anyway so my next machine had 30 GB - twice as much as before - this time it was a self build so I got as big of a drive as I could afford within the pre-set budget.

The next couple of computers were also self builds, well self mashups - upgrades on that 1999 machine that involved everything from new graphics cards, new motherboards, new sound cards, new memory and a new processor - even a couple of new cases.

The only thing that stayed was the hard drive which, until three years ago was just about big enough - so I replaced the hard drive with a 60GB one which was more than enough - until 18 months ago.

The 60GB upgrade was to accomodate the wealth of photos I was building up of the kids, the island, from event and from holidays - it’s amazing how much space a few thousands photos need.

Then add the audio/video collection into it - for a year I had to delete podcasts after listening to them, keep my mp3 collection on DVDs and delete every TV show before I’d finished watching it - forget downloading movies.

I have a massive games collection but couldn’t install more than one at a time - I had to install it, play it and then uninstall it straight away.

So we brought a 300 GB external hard drive. I moved all the audio, video, web, text and photo files to the new hard drive (which has been a massive help when I’ve needed to re-build) and then installed a chunck of games on the old 60GB.

Now - 18 months later we’re having to think about increasing hard drive space again. I have 50GB left on my external drive - 50GB of 300GB in total and there is about 5GB left on the system drive.

50GB doesn’t go very far - add a few thousands photos (we’ve got our first foreign holiday with the children this year), an ever increasing MP3 collection (I write about new music for the BBC), video files from iTunes, BitTorrent, 4OD, BBC et al and an increasing number of articles, report, half written books and songs in word format and the space is gone.

Then if you add the podcasts I like to archive, the mass of video podcasts I haven’t watched yet and an increasing number of podcasts set to launch from the BBC in line with the iPlayer and you can see why I need more space.

So it’s going to be another external drive. I’ve come to the decision since first buying the 300GB external drive that you should NEVER keep ‘content’ on an internal hard drive.

I’ve re-built my machine four times in 18 months (I’m really starting to get to know the Microsoft activation guy in India) because my wife keeps downloading crap to it or it gets really slow due to so many software programmes or age (it’s more or less still the original 1999 machine but with none of the original parts) and before the hard drive I had to burn everything to dozens of DVDs.

Now I just unplug the hard drive before I start and then plug it in again when It’s all done - and all my stuff is there.

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