How much data storage do you have at home?

[rogerg (Roger)]

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 ), 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!! It's just an enormous amount of data. 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.

Leon

[sheeny (Al)]

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. 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! 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.

Things have bloated in leaps and bounds since then!

Al.

[rogerg (Roger)]

Originally Posted by 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!

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

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

Originally Posted by sheeny

Things have bloated in leaps and bounds since then!
Al.

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 (Mike)]

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

[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 (Phil)]

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 )

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 (Roger)]

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!!

[g__day (Matthew)]

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 (Matt)]

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.

[AlexN]

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

[Matty P (Matt)]

Originally Posted by AlexN

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

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.

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.

[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