Do You Need The 2tb Hard Disk?

[H.O.D 0]

These days everyone has tons of digital content on their computers - photos, movies and most importantly, music! And for storing all this insane content, we do need a lot of space on the computer. But it's never possible to put all of the content on the system, since fresh content keeps coming in. So most of us resort to storing this data on external hard disks, dvds or other storage media. But by doing this, we won't have access to all of the data at once. So what we need is a hard disk with extreme storage capacity. And today, we have just that - a hard disk that can store 2000 GB (2TB) of data!

My question is, would you need such a hard disk? Of course now it is expensive and many people won't be able to afford it, but the prices are bound to come down once competition and popularity increase, but even then, do you have the need for it?! In my case, I would need around 500GB to store all of my content at once place, leaving room for more fresh content to come. With such an insane amount of space as 2TB, I guess maintanance would be a little difficult as we would become a bit too carefree to bother what is on the hard disk. On the other hand, we would never have to bother about running out of space! You could install multiple OSes to your heart's content!

Well all that's fine for me - what is your opinion about this beast?

[bluedragon 0]

If Price is not too high people might consider buying it.I don't get that much pocket money , so I won't be able to buy it but I would definitely want to buy it if someone else is paying for it :PI have 2x250 GB and 1x120 GB on my system and I seriously need more space since my disk is running out of space.I have a huge collection of songs, games and movies. This only takes up around 70% of the usage.softwares and other stuff like documents , pictures only take up the rest 30 %.I believe this is the general pattern amongst most of the users. Now if we see at the current trends of emerging High Definition Movies and the Huge sizes of Games. I believe Most of us would want to get their hands on one of these monster sized Drivesbtw.. I think 1 TB drive can also be considered right now and then later when the prices drop further buy another 1 TB drive.P.S. As far as the maintenance goes, I believe it won't be a problem if we have proper up to date tools but as far as I know , I think failure rate increases as the size of the drive is increased. since manufacturers are focusing on bringing down the cost of their drives while keeping the capacity as high as possible , Quality is getting effected. In india , I believe 100% of the HDDs are chinese

[FouGilang 0]

Let's see...I have an 120gb and 80gb harddiskThe 120gb still has 60gb on itThe 80gb has been cleaned out (thanks to the incident yesterday) =.=I dont keep those old time video i watched, i'll rather take some new and fresh video and delete it again later (dont want to watch them later anyway)I only keep the music i playedI'm not collecting pictureI dont have high class pc to play hardcore gamesSo... No, i'm not taking this one

[shadowx 0]

My gaming machine has 1.5TB drive, so yeh, i think 2TB is reasonable!! You need to think of the future. Its likely you will still be using that drive in 4 or 5 years time (the average user would be) so given the rate of expansion in computing power (it doubles every 18 months) so in 5 years computers will be EIGHT times more powerful than right now it means that data will also be larger to give better quality. Windows for example has grown to a massive size since the old systems!

[H.O.D 0]

My gaming machine has 1.5TB drive, so yeh, i think 2TB is reasonable!!

Wow you have 1.5 TB already?! That's really impressive! I never had the need for that much space till now because i prefer storing data in DVDs more. I think I have around 300GB of data in DVDs and another 200GB on my system now, and that's only because I don't have any hi-def content. If I had, then I'm sure the figure would have been much more larger! Well today not many people are preferring to get hi-def content anyway because they can't afford to buy so many discs regularly, and downloading off the net - well, that's a touchy issue but the fact remains that not many people would like to sacrifice 1GB of space for a mere 20 minutes of video! They won't have the proper internet speed as well. That's the reason not many people have the need for such massive hard disks yet...

[rayzoredge 2]

Depending on what you have already for technology, 2TB might actually be as essential as 2GB back in the day when we were happy with 200MB hard drives.

 

With the massive amount of movies, music, and pictures I have on my hard drives, I had to upgrade first from 200GB to 500GB, then from 500GB to 1.5TB because I actually filled up my 500GB. And of course, I had to buy in pairs for a physical backup, so it's actually rather expensive but worth it, considering that no one thinks about how cold your blood feels when you hear that dreaded clicking sound on a hard drive that contains your digital life on it.

 

(I read a post somewhere by some elitist that he never had to back up his crap because he was running OSX. I can't wait for his hard drive to fail. Yes, I'm evil. )

 

I gave my 200GB to a friend of mine and now have two 500GB hard drives and my new 1.5TB hard drive. I have one 500GB posing as my media drive that I plug straight into my Xbox 360 so I can avoid streaming movies (formatted to FAT32 using GParted), use the other 500GB to hold my backup minus my movies (since it's on the media drive, "backed up," and use the new 1.5TB as my external hard drive that holds everything.

 

If you're one of those folks that think XXXGB is enough, think about future-proofing yourself. With games getting larger, programs putting a larger hard drive footprint, HD movies, the hundreds to thousands of pictures you take with your camera (from 1 to 3MB each)... it's easy to justify getting what seems like a humongous and unnecessary capacity than face running out of room. Wait as long as you can for price-per-GB to drop as low as it can, then buy the second-newest thing. Put an extended warranty on it if you use your drives frequently enough to warrant a failure down the road and drive on.

[shadowx 0]

The last paragraph of rayzoredge's post is exaclty what i mean! Im sure my win 98 machine had a 1GB drive.... Bad times... Not so long ago 4gb machines were servers and mainframes, now they are laptops and desktops.I have a DSLR camera which, if i use JPG and RAW format can easily be over 20mb per photo (two files, one of which is minimum 13mb) then i have UT2007 game which is another few GB gone without additional maps, mods etc... I used to play World of warcraft and my folder for that was 30gb alone (but i couldve reduced it) im not a huge music person as im picky but i have 15-20 CDs on my laptop system. plus downloaded games. In total i h ave my 1.5TB drive in my gaming machine which is disappointingly empty as ive only had it a few weeks, my 40gb laptop drive inside the laptop, another 40gb which is sitting in a USB caddy as the laptop host broke, then a 320gb USB hdd for backups. I have a spare 120gb drive that i have no use for at the moment and a spare 20gb so meh, i have a fair bit of storage And then my mum and bro's laptops probably have 200gb between them XDI was amazed to learn the servers here at work have 32gb RAM, thats bigger than one of my hard drives!! But it needs it, and as computers grow so does data need both in terms on individual file size (HD Video and blu-ray!) and in the amount people download, lets face it, on a 56kbps modem no-one downloaded ANYTHING! But with 50-100mb speeds only a few years away thats a movie in under a minute. That's going to be a lot of downloads to store!EDIT: I suppose it also depends where you live, i live in the UK which, comparatively, is a "rich" country and individuals here tend to be richer than those in "developing" countries, so as a country we can afford to import higher specification devices. Whereas in poorer regions even a 20gb drive would seem huge. i dont mean to say that the UK is superior, but you know what i mean

Edited October 26, 2009 by shadowx (see edit history)

[truefusion 3]

All the hard drives combined that are in my case don't even total 1TB or greater. I have perhaps no more than 750GBs with about over 300GBs to spare. While i game occasionally, i'm not a heavy gamer, so all my space isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Pictures, videos, games, music, you ask? I'm not really a collector of those (with a slight exception concerning music), and i would only keep them on my computer if i felt that they would be useful?even if i never see them or listen to them again?and if they were publicly available or if i had purchased them. I also don't do Warez (piracy), hence i'm not burdened by the space it takes up.The only reason i would consider getting another HDD is for back-up reasons (e.g. to shove my entire Linux installation in, so if i ever require a re-installation, i can just copy a previous state in without having to re-install everything) or for faster boot times (i.e. SSD). In my case, buying any HDD of at least 100GBs could be considered "future-proofing," but 2TB would be exaggerating for my case. Although i probably don't need a lot of things currently in my HDDs, you can, nevertheless, reduce the amount of wasted space by deleting things that you don't "need" and keeping things that you do "need."

[aloKNsh 0]

2 tb hard diski think this more than one could use in his or her whole life unless and untill he is an professional techiecozgeneral people use hd to make their computer full of music, videos, and moviesand also some their personal recordingand for that 200 gb is enough but for the future generation i think this will be also less

[H.O.D 0]

in the future 2TB will definitely become too less and then maybe we may need capacities like 320TB, 500TB, etc!!! It will soon become the age of the terabyte. we just need to move on with the times, that's all.

[inverse_bloom 0]

To me 2 terabytes is a bit too cumbersome, i consider how long it takes to do a scandisk check, (virus scan) or to format the drive and that is what puts me off. Despite this, i have an external 1 terabyte hd, an external 160 gig, and internal 160 gig, and 2 40 gigs across my laptop and pc. The WD terabyte drive takes a VERY long time to format when using a proper hard drive format program (like 2 days). I usually use the external 160 gig pocket drive and back up to DVD every now and again. Personally i'd prefer a blue-ray burner as an ideal alternative.

Edited October 31, 2009 by inverse_bloom (see edit history)

[Quatrux 4]

I think that Today 2 TB hard disk are quite normal, not everyone needs them though, but I would want one of those, in my laptop I have 320 GB hard disk, I don't put much things there because I have NAS (Network attached storage) of 500 GB it almost full, but it has and usb and I'm thinking of inserting an external at least 1 TB hard disk to it and will have even more place. Or I could burn DVDs to free some space but it's also time consuming. (I don't have blue-ray ;( )Today games are once installed 6-12 GB and usually people want to have more than one game, Windows and all the software usually can take from 20 GB to 120 GB. And I'll be silent about movies and music.I agree that it's really a pain to wait for a 500 GB or I imagine for a 2 TB hard disk to scan or defragment.

[Ho-oh'sRealm 0]

It all depends on what kind of content you have. Personally, I believe most people today would not need a 2tb HDD, however in the near future it could become like the amazing 32gb HDDs of 2000 :)I have a 1tb in my box, and I'm only using around 200gb of it. However, I've only had it for a few months (upgraded from a laptop with 120gb), and I've added 80gb in that short amount of time... a few games, programs, Windows 7, etc. I just don't see anyone needing a 2tb soon, unless you host huge files...