I, on the other hand, am running out of free space on my 4TB capacity desktop, and will be purchasing larger storage devices soon.
In my case it's my secondary computer, so I don't see a need to store much in the way of media (Movie, Music) etc on it, which is about the only way I imagine I would use that much space.
The OS and Applications takes up a decent chunk, as does VirtualBox, but other than that it's just documents and source code.
Oh, and I have an external 3TB drive where I house all of my backups and captures of old desktops. It's completely full, and I will be purchasing another ~3TB drive in the near future for backup purposes.
Making full disk backups and archiving huge collections of media assets you'll only ever use 1% of is just a huge burden of mind and a huge loss of portability and flexibility. Not to mention a waste of time and money.
I know you say you're an amateur as if professionals would have even more, but in reality, they've probably realized what a time sink it is and focused on just the small set of stuff that actually matters.
"You couldn't even sift through that shit in a lifetime, let alone use it all." "media assets you'll only ever use 1% of"
Assume someone's daily routine involves 3 hours (below average) of TV/movies, in HD. 5-6GB a day, 3TB is reached in under two years. 1% of 3TB is reached in a single week. Even hanging on to a small fraction of the media they watch for future viewing/sharing would fill up 3TB in a handful of years.
"Making full disk backups and archiving huge collections of media assets you'll only ever use 1% of is just a huge burden of mind and a huge loss of portability and flexibility."
Managing full disk backups means buying a disk and pointing an automated program at the folders you want. Average time per week: 0 minutes.
Managing huge collections of media assets: This means navigating services to click on movies and shows to download, and occasionally moving a season into a different folder. Average time per week: 5 minutes.
Burden of mind: Remember to buy a drive every several years, otherwise none.
Loss of portability: Keep it on an external drive if you want portability? Not sure what is meant here.
"Not to mention a waste of time and money."
Tell that to anyone with basic cable, as far as watching the content goes. Storing it after watching has negligible additional time/money cost.
Now do you see what the problem is with that comment? While it's certainly possible to be a digital hoarder, having two shelf's worth of movies on a hard drive is extremely weak evidence toward that.
75GB of TV 300GB of Movies 80GB of Music 9GB Pictures 8GB Code 140GB Games 84GB OS Images 64GB Installers (I rip game cds so I don't have to keep the discs around) 60GB VMs 50GB Containers 2GB Books 2GB Comics 200MB Documents 4GB Misc Audio 14GB Misc Video 240GB of cross-device backups
This stuff adds up. If I actually ripped my entire music, tv, and movie collection I'd easily fill up the rest of the disk. Mostly I'm just impatient about only 20MB/s reads off old cds and dvds.
I don't back it up, but it is RAIDed with 1-disk fault tolerance, and that's pretty much good enough for me. I mostly only ever add new content to the NAS or read existing ones, so I'm not worried about versioning.
Best of both worlds imo.
I deleted a few hundred GB of movies a while back and realized I didn't even need a multi-terrabyte drive at all. Feels good man.
There are cloud services that solve this but they have their own set of issues. Many are expensive compared to basic direct/network attached storage, others require photos to be public, others come with dubious guarantees that they will still exist next year.
I get a call from my sister with a 128GB MacBook Air every month or two asking to remind her how to move her baby photos/videos to her external drive. Every time we do it I am surprised how complicated and error prone the process is (we've managed to accidentally permanently delete photos). If anyone has a good recommendation for an alternative to iPhoto (and not cloud based) that understands the concept of archiving photos to a network/usb disk that is not always present I would love to hear them.
It supports both network and impermanently attached usb disks.
Instead, she should be using a private youtube for her videos, and Flickr for photos. The rest should fit in a dropbox account. Not only will her data have a team of professionals trying to prevent the inevitable fuck-up, and she'll enjoy 'cloud' benefits, but also she'll have a chance to curate her collection during upload, because no one has enough time in their life to look at 200GB of home movies and photos every 6 months (it's turning into a landfill)
It is much thanks to me that she does not up it on the cloud. I don't trust cloud services, so that's what I suggest to her -- I'm happy to sysadmin her devices whenever she needs me to though.
I hope in the future there are truly Easy-to-use-for-moms storage devices, along with the software to go with them, that gives them all the benefits cloud may have.
However, I do have something like 6TB of active desktop storage (not including NAS) at capacity because of software, audio samples, disk images, virtual machines, backups, documentaries and shows, etc.
Everyone just uses computers differently. My mom's storage is something like 2TB and I think about 70% of it is home movies and photos. The remaining 30% are duplicates of some of the same files, likely on the same disk in different directories.
If I'm making a home movie, I'll just copy the files to the SDD temporarily. I have 30GB+ free most of the time.
The entire point is that pretty much any other (read: non-Apple) laptop/desktop you buy nowadays is going to come with at least 500 GB, and generally 1 TB nowadays.
No need to get up in arms and whine that Apple is doing everything just right for your tastes.
edit: I obviously wasn't referring to 1 TB SSDs. The parent's comment said that 128 GB is pretty paltry for storage capacity nowadays, as the thread is concerning the rate of growth of SSDs.
Is that the case? Most machines I've seen around the cost of the Macbook Air still come with hard disks or 128G SSDs - maybe a couple might push that to 256.
Indeed, I don't think I've even seen a laptop with 1TB of SSD, aside from the very-top-end-I-upgraded-it-especially Retina Macbook.
Which laptops are these which come with 500GB SSDs in the base models? Or are you suggesting that Apple should make a laptop with a 500GB spinning disk in the base model? Because funnily enough, they have one; the non-retina 13" MBP. Of course, no-one buys that, because it's worse than the cheaper Airs by all metrics but storage capacity, but it's there if you want it.
I'll take that any day over extra storage I don't need.
That's for non SSD drives. So every other laptop/desktop you're gonna get with those storage sizes also has rotating rust disks, with are more volatile due to moving parts, have much worse read/write speeds and are noisy.
Yep, clarified in my edit.
>So every other laptop/desktop you're gonna get with those storage sizes also has rotating rust disks, with are more volatile due to moving parts, have much worse read/write speeds and are noisy.
That's cute. So now hard disks are so obtrusive, fallible, and out-dated that they're literally not an option anymore? I think some people have such a love affair for the acronym SSD that they forget, disk access is still hundreds of thousands of clock cycles regardless.
SSD benchmarks are clearly better than HDD all around, but not by the orders of magnitude that you seem to believe.
A time N improvement is still better that no or marginal improvement, even if it's not 2 orders of magnitude better.
It makes all the difference between waiting for 5 minutes for some IO process to finish and waiting for 1 minute. 1 second would have been nice, but 1 minute is already a game changer.
Are you being sarcastic?
If they really wanted to keep the price down, they wouldn't strive for 2x or higher profit. MacBooks (any Apple hardware) feature component-set easily sold at half the price. You are simply paying for the Apple logo.
Almost as HP, Acer, Asus, Fujitsu, Toshiba, Sony and co. don't want an easy few hundred million dollars. Or as if you're wrong and there's more than a logo involved.
You have absolutely no clue what you are talking about.
I'm paying for a high quality machine with many features already built in, integrated with a well designed, power-sipping, user security and user privacy optimized operating system that uses modern best practices under the hood that scale to current and future multicore processors, with a solid UNIX at its core with hardware drivers that just work. And amazing support like free replacement motherboards, hard disks, batteries, chargers, keyboards, screens, etc. under AppleCare if anything goes wrong.
Apple wants to keep the price down so they can keep their margins high