I’m pretty happy with my Macbook Pro. But on the day I bought it, I started planning upgrades: I’m a geek, after all.
The first thing on my list- upgrade from the default 2 GB to 4 GB of RAM. That was done about a week after I bought the machine. Second on my list: a larger and faster hard drive. 120 GB of storage on a 5400 RPM drive is nice, but 240 GB at 7200 RPM… that would be just the ticket.
The biggest drives I could find in the right form factor running at 7200 RPM only provide 200 GB of storage. If I’m going to go through the hassle of installing a new hard drive, 80 GB of additional storage just isn’t adequate- double my current storage is the least I’ll make the effort for. I’m still waiting for such a beast to become available, but Fujitsu has just announced pretty much the drive I’m looking for: up to 320 GB of storage spinning at 7200 RPM in a 2.5″ laptop form factor. It is apparently scheduled for release in June of this year.
Do I really need 320 GB, or even 240 GB, of storage? My answer is that I can expand what I store to fill any disk capacity I find in my possession. I’ll see what kind of price Fujitsu puts on their new drives when they finally ship later this year…
You can thank Vista for that… by the time you take the operating system and all it’s do dads. the space it wants to work in, Office, and of course the really efficient Vista auto back up system that eats drive space, you have to really think that the first 150GB of your hard drive are used up. And 1GB of ram is really the minimum to run Vista, and even then it bogs down. You really need 2 GB minimum and to purr along I suspect you’d want 4, which means a 64 bit system.
The downside is a lot pf people were sold crippled laptops because they had an operating system that the machine couldn’t handle – the bright side is the manufacturers are having to come up with new er higher performance laptop hardware.
Since the machine in question is a MacBook Pro which runs OS X, I really can’t thank Vista for that 😉 Actually, although it is stylish these days to blame Vista for pretty much everything, the truth is I have one Vista based computer in the house. And three XP based systems, one Linux based server, and a Macintosh (BSD Unix with a funky graphical layer on top).
I have vast quantities of disk capacity for several reasons, not the least of which is that it almost obscenely cheap. I have a lot of photographs, for one thing: 20 gigabytes worth, at least. I also have an appetite for computer games: typically 20-30 GB per machine. Then there are music files: another 10+ GB. Various productivity applications and development tools account for another 10-20 GB. And of course backups: Vista’s backup and Mac’s Time Machine. Add to this the fact that I hate seeing my hard drives more than about 50% full… and the capacity numbers rapidly become very large, even if actual consumed storage is much less. And I’ll skip entirely talking about *useful* stored information 😉
I have 300 GB on my main desktop machine, plus 750 GB for its backup. Then I have another 500 GB on my Linux server, and 120 GB internal plus a 500 GB external drive for my MacBook, and a 1 terabyte (1000 GB) drive on my Macintosh Time Capsule… plus a couple of 250 GB drives that I keep around for various shared storage purposes. That comes to something like three and a half terabytes of storage, give or take: call it four terabytes, if you count the storage in my secondary computers and spare hard drives.
My total home storage capacity translates to approximately 0.25 LoC*, which is a size I never could have imagined having in my house 20 years ago.
* Libraries of Congress, counting just the books- total size of the LoC is roughly estimated at 20 million books or 20 terabytes of written information, but probably more like 3 petabytes of total information including audio, images, and movies. See also How much information is there in the world? which, although a decade old, still gives some nice comparisons.