I added up all the data storage in my home office, just for kicks: 652 gigabytes. Two thirds is disk-based, most of the other third is optical.
Pretty pedestrian quantities – I mostly work out of a Seagate office, so our home office is literally that.
I’m satisfied for now with my manual disaster recovery system – although I don’t rotate my offsite backups nearly often enough. As I download more video, I’m considering a move to online backup to complement my backup drive.
How much storage is in your home office? I’m sure you can top mine.
Presently on our “home office machine, I have 2 internal hard drives 500G + 200GB, and 3 external hard drives, 2 – 1TB drives and 750GB drive. If A gab my calculator that nets out at 3.4 TB. I have on order 2 additional 1TB drives so I will total out at 5.4 TB. Why so much? Home video, music and digital photography – oh yeah, and a few GB for the MS office programs. So here’s a few things to blog about 1) why do so many of the new computers ( I am looking to buy a new one literally today) only allow two internal drives – wha wants an ultra mini, ultra slim, ultra etc, desktop? It doesn’t sit on the desk top, it is out of the way, and out of view. With only 2 internal drives there isn’t enough room for the storage one needs. Hard to find a “tower system that will hold 2 optical, 1 floppy for old times, and 4 internal hard drives. 2) Try connecting 4 or 5 external drives. No one offeres enough USB2 or external SATA hookups to efficiently run a system. Either we need to create a 10TB drive today or the PC manufactureres need to get in line with the need for multiple drive storage. Now that would really help!
5 terabytes…now you’re talking! What’s your estimate of how much storage is allocated for video? Music? Photos?
I read this and thought, hmmm, I wonder how much I have in my house. I know that between my notebooks, desktops, home server, and external storage, I had quite a bit. I had to double-check my numbers because it seemed too high! Dang, I didn’t know I had that much storage and I still feel like I need more because I’m constantly moving recorded TV files off the desktops! I have three desktops (kids 250GB, office 1.5TB – 2 drives, kitchen 250GB); 2 notebooks (work 80GB, spouse 120GB); Home Server (500GB, 320GB, & Seagate USB 1.0TB); NAS (Maxtor 500GB for music streaming and Web Sharing – Central Axis); USB Drives for backups (Seagate 1.0TB, Seagate freeagent 160GB, Maxtor OneTouch 100GB). Plus, Playstation 40GB! If my math is correct, that’s ~5.8TB of storage. WOW, I had no idea. I’d say the majority of my storage is movies, TV Shows (MS MediaCenter), and Music. I’ve converted all my CD’s and iTunes to lossless format and it’s up to about 700GB. We use the movies and TV Shows to stream to the Playstation3 (TV out) and into the living room. We also converted a lot of the kids movies so they could just launch them on the computer. Lot’s of stuff I guess! I guess I never really put it all together yet because I often struggle to organize it all. I need a better solution to try and organize and catalog this stuff! It’s all just THERE….Thanks for the posts Pete, keep them up!
I can’t match the numbers above, but I did stop and think the last time I upgraded my home PC. I remember a string of things that put together stagger my mind. When I finally moved from my Amiga 1000 to a PC, I did it so I could generate 3-D models for Computer Numerical Control (CNC) milling for the aerospace industry. I was king of the hill with a 486 DX-2, 32 MB of RAM and a whopping 1 GB HDD. I paid just a little over $1100 for that drive. Years later working for IBM, I was pulling a pallet of 8 GB laptop drives when I walked by the original RAMAC 5 MB storage unit that was the size of a refrigerator. I stopped and did a quick check and I had 64000 times as much storage on this pallet as stood against the wall in that RAMAC. The latest “take pause” moment was when I just put a terabyte of RAID 5 storage in my home PC a few months ago. It’s 64% full with lossless music and my wife’s photographs which we store in RAW format. Last night I was cleaning out a storage bin and found a 250 MB drive that I got about 8 years ago. What a difference a decade makes, eh?
video dominates the numbers – probably close to 60-70% (mostly AVI format for editing). Follow that by Digital photos (a 10 Mpixel camera fills up storage space rapidly) maybe 10%, and then music (mostly at 192bps but would really like room for beter quality) at around 5%. The rest is for OS, software, and other data files.
if you throw in the kids laptops, thier study pc, and each of their external backup drives, then as a house hold we are into the 8TB range on magnetic storage. If then you toss in all the removable optical storage media then we approximately double that total storage. HAving a way to make it centrally accessable, protected, fire and theftproof, and organized would be really valueable…………..
I definitelty can’t top yours
Firstly, fantastic site. I had to sit down and work this through but in total I have 3.7GB of storage. I have excluded the various iPods around the house and the PVR! But here is the breakdown. 500GB iMac, 80 GB MacBook Air, 500GB Apple Time Capsule, 1TB Seagate Freeagent Mac Desk, 320 GB Seagate Freeagent Mac Go. I also have a WD Passport 120GB and a WD My Book 250GB both of which are now used for off-site storage of photographs, documents, video and music. I must say that I am very impressed by the new Freeagents in the Mac flavour, I was about to purchase the WD Studio editions but luckily these cam out just before I made my purchase. I bought the 1TB Freeagent to act as my main Time Machine storage area as well as my iTunes library. The Apple Time Capsule is used for the sole back up of my MacBook Air as this, I think makes perfect sense – it happens automatically so I never forget or put it off!
Thanks Dylan! Nice example of an Apple House. Intrigues me, because Apple seems to be looking at this all as a whole more than most. That’s coming from a PC guy!
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