How much data storage do you have at home?

[rogerg]

G'day all,

Yesterday I received a bunch of goodies I ordered to go with my new laptop arriving any day (nice timing for my birthday on Saturday gone :D), one of them was a 1TB Network-Attached-Storage drive (gigabit connection). Our current storage of a 300GB NAS is almost at capacity, as is it's backup drive of 350GB.

In total we now have about 1.8TB of "in use" storage at home (between the two of us, me doing astrophotography and general photography, and my partner who does landscape/nature/macro photography).

I find it astonishing every time I think about it that a home would have 1TB of storage, let alone over 1TB!! :eyepop: It's just an enormous amount of data. :whistle: Coming from the days of a 5.25" floppy drive, 20mb HD and then progressing to 500MB HD in a 486!

I bet there's a lot of astro photographers on this group who have more than I, for video based photography and those who are more active than I in astrophotography, or who have larger megapixel CCD cameras.

So... just for the sake of interest and chatting.. how much storage do you have for personal use at home ? (or if you don't do astronomy at home, your observatory/etc)

Roger.

[Dennis]

You must be a young whippersnapper Roger – I remember using punch cards and having to compile programs overnight in batch, as well as 8” floppy discs on an IBM System36 mid-range computer! LOL!

Cheers

Dennis

[avandonk]

In 1968 my PDP 8 had 2k of memory. We quickly up graded to 4k then would you believe 32k! Oh such joy and power! Whats a hard drive?

We were far more cunning to keep the code very slim as we had to.

Bert

[leon]

We started with the Comondore 64 back in the old days, actually it belonged to my some, now that was some real technology in those days. :lol: :lol:

Leon :thumbsup:

[sheeny]

I remember starting off with punch cards and cards we had to "colour in" with a pencil so we could run programs in batch mode at the county council office. That was for Computer Studies at school.

Then we got a 4k Wang computer at school:thumbsup:. It had a B/W screen and a cassette drive. The next year the school got an 8k Tandy... wow!

When I started uni, it was all teletype terminals to the mainframe. By 5th year at uni I bought my own computer - a 32k MicroBee!:D I wrote my thesis on that - again with a cassette drive. We wrote microprocessor code at uni on Apple IIs. After I graduated I upgraded the µB to a "chook in book" with twin 3.5" floppy drives. About the same time, I think the first PC's were showing up at work - we had an original IBM PC that the whole engineering department could use. I think it had a 10M HDD.:lol:

Things have bloated in leaps and bounds since then!

Al.

[rogerg]

Ahh .. yes.. the punchcard stories :D I often hassle my boss about punchcards when he brings it up, I make a point of making him feel old :D

I started off with an Amstrad 64 which my dad bought for the family in 1986 :) I would've been 7 at the time. Then I took over the family's PC decisions and purchases from 486 DX 33 onwards :)



Yeah, you're not wrong, bloated is the right word. I really do believe that MS product in particular, but also others like Adobe, are bloated for little reason other than hardware storage being cheaper than programming hours. It seems like such a waste, but it's the economy of it all.

[iceman]

I loved the Commodore 64.. I used to develop demos and games. It got me started in my IT career and it was fun too :)

I've got about 1.4TB of total storage for my "life".

[AlexN]

I have 3Tb in my desktop, 160gb in my webserver, 60gb in my notebook, 50gb in my gateway and a WD 1tb NAS...

Most of it is full :eek:

[rat156]

About to upgrade the Mac with a 1Tb HDD it already has 480Gb of internal storage and a Tb FireWire external drive. The observatory PC has about 750 Gb of hard drive space. I found a USB thing that you just plug your internal HDD's into that I'm planning to use to backup the important stuff.

Free disk space is wasted disk space!

Cheers
Stuart

[AlexN]

free disk space is useful when capturing 50 x 1gb AVI's at least twice a week.... Room to move is always nice.

[acropolite]

I've got around 1Tb, a little over if I count my Laptop.

Like some of the others my earliest exposure was on a PDP11, my first real computer was a DSE syetem 80 (Z80 Based) which was a wonderful platform to experience Basic and machine code, as well as a hardware fiddlers delight. I remember upgrading from the stock 16K of ram to a whopping 48K by pigybacking the ram chips (physically soldered on top of each other, all pins with the exception of RAS and CAS from memory :lol: )

Programs were stored on a very dodgy audio cassette interface, but those with money to burn, could buy an S100 interface with up to 2 floppy drives.

[rogerg]

Very interesting how this is turning out ... at first it looked like the larger capacity 2TB - 4TB was miles ahead which surprised me, but now I see the 500GB to 1TB is out in front. Time will tell how it develops from here :)

Those people with around 4TB or more, what a lot of data!! :eyepop:

[g__day]

Being on my 15 custom built PC, I have about 8 active round the house plus a NAS - so about 300GB on a normal node, same on the NAS and 700 on my personal PC - it all adds up, and is very cheap nowadays.

When I started a 5MB Winchester cost $5,000 exc tax and you had to write your own device driver!

[Matty P]

I have just over 1TB of total storage space. I use a 500gb WD External HDD to store all my images. I don't think that is going to last very long though. :P

:thumbsup:

[AlexN]

if you go fairly hard out you can fill 500Gb in 2 days worth of astro + terrestrial imaging...

[Matty P]

Probably, I wouldn't be surprised.

Usually when imaging Jupiter and the seeing is good. I usually capture around 25GB --> 50GB of data (sometimes more). A week of good seeing, you'll have a full hard drive. It is not going to happen anytime soon though. :whistle:

It is kind of scary because of today's modern technology. 500GB of storage doesn't seem like a lot of storage space anymore, even though it is. Most people could easily fill up a 500GB HDD in no time.
Lucky I wasn't around when computers only had 2K of memory. :lol: :eyepop:

:thumbsup:

[Ian Robinson]

Notebook is getting pretty full (about 15 GB left of the 40 GB HDD).... need a bigger HDD soon (told by Dell the biggest I can put in is 80 GB , I don't believe them), can't bother with upgrading the notebook HDD and mucking about reinstalling or shift everything on old drive over to a new bigger drive right now .... more bother than it's worth.

The desktop has a 400 GB HDD , it's not got much on it , I don't use the desktop much.

I think a 1.0 TB external HDD USB2 might be handy for the astro imaging.

[rat156]

Just be careful with external HDD's. If you're doing planetary stuff it can affect the framerate you can capture. You'll end up capturing to the onboard HDD and transferring to the external drive. It's even worse with firewire, I can't use the external disk and the DMK at the same time. Hence the observatory PC has a 500Gb HDD in it. I then transfer to a smaller Firewire external drive to process it on my laptop in the warmth.

Laptop just got a 250Gb HDD put in for $100, it now has plenty of space...

Cheers
Stuart

[AlexN]

Yeah I capture directly to my notebook, then transfer them to the NAS when done.

[matt]

Stuart.

I have no trouble capturing to my external SeaGate HDD using my DMK with my laptop:shrug:

[wmzaphod]

My goodness, I am feeling young at 50 (compared to some of you guys) :P:D



Yeah, it's a worry - the more storage I get, the more I store :whistle: - life was much simpler with floppy disks :rolleyes:



Gee, we've come so far eh! HD space is so cheap, I run two 500 gb drives (replicated) to store my photos but I still burn to DVD.........


Peter

[MrB]

TRS-80, Amstrad, Vic-20, C-64/128, microbee, DSE Wizard..... some Texas Instruments thing a mate had....
Ahhh the memories!!

BTW, the microbee was Aussie designed and built, sold all over the world (particularly popular in Swedish schools!!??) and competed well for a while with the Apple but microbee were a bit slow to adopt the PC-clone culture with their 'Matilda' and Australia's most succesfull competitive computer manufacturer was dead...

A nice little side-story from an email on the net by Owen Hill(microbee)
Jim Rowe may be a familiar name to anyone that buys Silicon Chip magazine.

[westsiderailway]

well i have about 2TB.

1TB in my Monster of a Desktop, it's a monster in more ways then one.

250GB in my laptop and about 800GB NAS.

Back in the good old days:rofl::rofl:

Started with the TRS-80 Model I, then upgraded to the Commodre 64 then the 128 with dual drives:eyepop:

I can still remember the advert for the commodore 64....

"Are you keeping up with the commodore, as it's keeping with you."

People used to think that we were talking about cars.:screwy::lol:

[Glenhuon]

Laptop only has 40Gb + 160Gb external, but the one inside has 2x 160Gb Sata and a 250Gb IDE. Shed puter (home imaging rig) has 40GB for the system and 400Gb IDE for Data. Just picked up 5 New drives on Ebay, 3 x SATA 160Gb, 1x 400Gb IDE and a 160Gb IDE for $250 :)

Bill

[wmzaphod]

Gee, that's not a bad buy :)

[Tandum]

I got 3x500gig drives in raid 5 for storage on the linux box, so about 900gig there but it's almost full and about 500 meg each in 2 other desktops. Sort of waiting for SSD drives to get big and cheap before buying any more :)

[wmzaphod]

You and me both.... ;)

[Tandum]

I guess your talking about SSD drives. I see 64gig drives at $1200 + tax just now but they are doing 120 MB/s transfers instead of the current 12 to 25 MB/s :)

[AlexN]

64gb SSD for $1200 is actually pretty reasonable... You could almost justify that to yourself... until you realise that just $600 more buys a QHY8 :P

[vash]

gee, I have a 120 gig hard drive in the lappy and a 40 gig external hard drive (Somewhere) not attached to anything, I normally just burn the raw files to dvd when I get 4 gig of them, if I want to go through the data again I would rather start from the begining. Mind you I'm not capturing video.

[snowyskiesau]

I've got much more storage space than I really need in 3 computers plus a laptop. An external tape drive is used to (sometimes) back it up.

However the biggest single disk I have in the PVR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_video_recorder) (Topfield 5000). It's a single 400GB drive which gives me about 120 hours of TV recording. It's about two thirds full at the moment.

[Quark]

Hi Roger,
Ever since getting involved in digital astro imaging I never seem to have enough storage on my hard drive. Over the last 6 years I have updated my laptop several times but it seems to take very little time before my hard drive becomes crowded again.

Think I have solved the problem though now, at least for a while. My new Toshiba has 640 GB That is 2 x 320 GB drives and I have a 320 GB satellite drive that I dump my images onto direct from my DMK. I think my current 960 GB capacity will do for a while.

Regards
Trevor

[g__day]

I finally got sick of a fragile 300GB no name NAS, redeployed its HDD and got a Western Digital MyWorldBook 500GB capacity 1 gigabit network connection NAS for $199 from Office Works to replace it. It has worked fine - very reliable, a tad slow, a tad difficult to change workgroups (my workgroup was the Original Optus Broadband @Home setup - MyWorldBook won't allow you to enter the @ symbol in a workgroup name).

So with NAS or SAN on a gigabit network - its real easy to add capacity!

[wraithe]

rofl, I feel young but at the same time feel old...
I was happy to have missed out on the punch cards, but mum use to get upset at me taping over her country music tapes...
Cant remember where the first machine was called but it was a gift from a friend, quickly replace with a brand new released system80...
Then the bug bit and it only let go of late, finally got bored with computers...

Storage wise, my son has my server as a games machine and that has 160gb storage on the slave drive...(full of course)...
My tv has about 60 gb stored on the drive as the partition for the tv to use is only 20gb and not necassary for anything except the tv app..
My laptop is about 60 gb down now and about 20 gb left...
the slave drive in the server is formatted with reiserfs and the master has 2 partitions, one ntfs and other is ext3..
tv is ext3 for both and my laptop is ext3 also...
I am hoping to get either a new laptop or a larger drive, who knows, at the moment a house move is going to happen and then I may just go sicko and buy a tractor instead...

So if anyone has a spare tb drive, I shall try and fill it with junk...

One thing i do like about using ext3, seems to store more and better access...but then there are good filesystems available linux and each has a bonus for certain situations...

[smenkhare]

about 30Tb in an EMC symmetrix. :P
at home though i only have about 2Tb. Planning on getting another Tb drive soon.

[Barrykgerdes]

I have an old PC in the ceiling still connected to power and fully operational. I test it every two or three weeks.

It has DOS 6.2, Multimate, Wordstar, Symphony and Dataflex plus a lot of other generally useless junk and 1 MB of memory. However it has enough capacity to do all the essentials of a computer still. It has the princely capacity of a 20MB MFM hard drive with 15 MB unused.

It has a 2MHz processor and it can start up from cold. I can enter my accounts on the spread sheet or look up an address in the DB in less than a minute and shut down. Slightly less than the time it takes Windows XP to load on a 3.3 Ghz machine!

What the hell do we need TB's for except to collect more data than you can ever use:P:P:P;)

Barry

[Dennis]

I guess it depends on what you do with the PC?

Recording 1½ hours of HDTV generates a file of the order of 7-10Gb and an evening spent capturing AVI’s of the Moon or Jupiter can easily produce 30-40 Gb of data.:)

Cheers

Dennis

[AlexN]

I've easily caught 250gb of data recording lunar images with the DBK31 in one night of good seeing...

I usually capture around 550mb worth of images a night during deep sky imaging... sometimes more, sometimes less, but I store all raw data, I dont delete anything. You never know, one day you might learn a new processing routine that will help one of your old images, I have most of the videos from my planetary/lunar imaging, every RAW DSLR file I've ever taken (in 5 odd years of photography) every .FIT file from my QHY8.... I store these things for rainy days, new programs with new, more powerful processing tools..

I just bought another TB HDD for my desktop, and a 2TB network attached device... Bringing my total now, to 10Tb of storage space (not including my windows/installed programs disks), I think about 4.1TB of it all is free...

[GrampianStars]

:lol: just like old grand parents in the retirement village
a short visit every two or three weeks
to see if there still fully operational :whistle:

[Kevnool]

Filled up my 400 gb external cant take no more entries so over to big w grabbed a verbatim 1tb $185 so now comes the lenghty transfer i,m guessing 8 hours to complete all the files copied over.

Then my son has a smile on his face cause he has dibs on the old 400.
Cheers Kev.

[toryglen-boy]

My desktop has 6TB, my main laptop has 1TB, my netbook that i use in the field has 320GB, and i have 4 500GB 2.5 External drives

so thats 9.3 TB !!

:)

[Kevnool]

I,m not picking you,but is all that necessary?.......cheers Kev.

[toryglen-boy]

yes.

My home desktop double as a HTPC and has a massive library of UKTV, MP3's and HD Movies, and games also.

My main laptop has heaps of games on there, as it has a 9800GT and i do enjoy killing people, it also has a TV tuner, bluray drive, and Windows Media centre.

everything i burn optically, i like to store to disk to ..

so, i do use it all

:)

[Kevnool]

Media centre yep i understand....cheers Kev.

[Jen]

I only have 80g hard drive arrrrhhhh and it is very full :doh:
yes i really really need to update :whistle: because i do want to get into a bit of imaging :D

[Kevnool]

Grab an extrenal hard drive Jen for a 1tb its around the 190.00 mark.

I cant wait to see your images when you decide to start.
Cheers Kev.

[Jen]

Hey there Kev :) Yeah i have been looking at those lately i might just do that :thumbsup::thumbsup:

I cant wait either it will be an awsome feeling to be a part of the imaging threads :D:D
:D

[rat156]

One Tb less than I had this morning. Got home tonight and the main hard drive in the computer doesn't work. Pulled it out and whacked in into an external USB dock, spins up but won't mount.

I guess I'm going to find out how good Time Machine is on the Mac!

Bloody Seagate hard drives, this is the second one I've had stop working without warning.

It's WD for me now.

Cheers
Stuart

[darrellx]

Stuart

I hear you on the point of the Seagates. I had two of the 1.5TB Seagate drives and have just had to replace one of them. In its place, I have installed 2 of the Western Digital 640GB drives. I am preapring to change out the other Seagate drive before it decides to stop working.

At home (or at work), we don't use Seagates anymore, its only WD now.

Darrell

[chris110]

Ever since getting involved in digital astro imaging I never seem to have enough storage on my hard drive. Over the last 6 years I have updated my laptop several times but it seems to take very little time before my hard drive becomes crowded again.
Think I have solved the problem though now, at least for a while. My new Toshiba has 640 GB That is 2 x 320 GB drives and I have a 320 GB satellite drive that I dump my images onto direct from my DMK. I think my current 960 GB capacity will do for a while.

[Rod66]

All you youngin's, I remember we used to have races to see who could move beads on the abacus to calculate pie to the 13th decimal place. And that was before we even had decimals...

[DavidU]

HAHAHAHAHA:rofl: