Have we actually reached the peak storage needs for everyday use?

[YoungBlade]

Are we actually at the point people always used to joke about? The "no user needs more than X amount of hard drive space."

 

I can't find any normal people in my life who need more than 1TB of storage. Most can't even come close. When I do the math, that actually makes sense. Apart from videos, normal people just can't generate or consume enough data to need more for day-to-day life. You'd need to take dozens of photos a day with high MP cameras for multiple years to use that much space and never delete any of it.

 

Obviously, gamers, content creators, and heavy content consumers (audiophiles with lossless media and people running Plex servers and the like) are going to need all the storage they can get, as higher fidelity media is continuing to balloon in size.

 

But could 1TB actually be good enough for most people for the forseeable future?

[Tan3l6]

Yaeh, 1TB is enough for most, I think for now at least. At least My main SSD is 1TB, got some backup drives also, but main SSD is nowdays max 1/3 full.

I remember trying to use Windows 3.1 with a 40MB drive - got even couple of games on it, but that is literally thimble-full of storage nowdays.

[WhitetailAni]

4 minutes ago, YoungBlade said:

But could 1TB actually be good enough for most people for the forseeable future?

Call of Duty: Warzone says hi

[tkitch]

For a PC at home that just browses the net and fiddles around on a few local apps?  500GB is more than enough.

 

But even moderate gaming will fly past 1TB if you're not careful.

[HanZie82]

Like said before its fine to have little storage if you just browse the web or do your banking on the computer.

 

But nowadays people want to game, store their photos and videos.

That all adds up.

Personally i'm not even a crazy data hoarder.

But recording 4K clips on most phones now takes some storage.

 

 

Just some video's and game storage for 2 people...

[Dedayog]

Normal people need no more than enough to boot up and get online.  That's why Chromebooks were invented.

 

Anyone who needs storage will need such a varied amount.  Hard to say.

[Sauron]

Movies and games take up plenty of space - those aren't particularly exotic things to have on your computer. Sure, if you only store a bunch of pictures and office documents 1TB is plenty... but that's not me.

[YoungBlade]

44 minutes ago, HanZie82 said:

Like said before its fine to have little storage if you just browse the web or do your banking on the computer.

 

But nowadays people want to game, store their photos and videos.

That all adds up.

Personally i'm not even a crazy data hoarder.

But recording 4K clips on most phones now takes some storage.

 

 

Just some video's and game storage for 2 people...

 

9 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Movies and games take up plenty of space - those aren't particularly exotic things to have on your computer. Sure, if you only store a bunch of pictures and office documents 1TB is plenty... but that's not me.

I think you overestimate how common it is to have a bunch of videos and games on your computer. A lot of people have streaming services for movies and consoles for gaming.

Most people I know don't store large video files. If they do anything with video, they mainly just record short clips for Snapchat and TikTok and then delete most of them after uploading. Some have things like wedding videos, sure, but that alone won't fill a drive. And if they even play PC games at all, they jusy play one or two popular, lightweight titles like Minecraft, League, Fortnite, The Sims, etc.

 

We enthusiasts are the exception. I've got 5TB of storage in my PC and over 7TB for backups. But I'm the only one in my family who even has more than 1TB, let alone who actually uses it.

[Sauron]

4 minutes ago, YoungBlade said:

A lot of people have streaming services for movies and consoles for gaming.

Having a console with its own storage is kind of cheating in this sense  and I do know quite a few people who play on PC despite not being huge tech enthusiasts. Streaming video may be more common, personally I'm not really willing to give up the far better quality you get from bluray for a lot of movies.

[HanZie82]

9 minutes ago, YoungBlade said:

We enthusiasts are the exception. I've got 5TB of storage in my PC and over 7TB for backups. But I'm the only one in my family who even has more than 1TB, let alone who actually uses it.

I guess that highly depends on the location then.

As i know enough people that were willing to spend the 300-700 bucks for a NAS and have several TB on there for their photos videos and other important stuff.

 

As also thing are done less and less on paper so you would need some sort of storage you can rely on, and people realize more and more a single drive in the computer isnt enough for safe-keeping's.
So either in the cloud, but the pessimistic we are we don't trust it to much and have our own storage.

 

 

But then i live in the center of a big city in a pretty wealthy country. Might bias things a bit.

 

 

1 minute ago, Sauron said:

Having a console with its own storage is kind of cheating in this sense  and I do know quite a few people who play on PC despite not being huge tech enthusiasts. Streaming video may be more common, personally I'm not really willing to give up the far better quality you get from bluray for a lot of movies.

Let us not start about the complete lack of support for proper audio on most of those streaming platforms.

[Doobeedoo]

Definitely not. Depends, some just, surf the web... I mean anyone gaming or saving stuff, work, TBs is quite common. I easily can use 5TBs+ and should we add that a single modern game can take 100s of GBs yeah and on top of that SSDs being the go to adds price.

[YoungBlade]

20 minutes ago, Doobeedoo said:

Definitely not. Depends, some just, surf the web... I mean anyone gaming or saving stuff, work, TBs is quite common. I easily can use 5TBs+ and should we add that a single modern game can take 100s of GBs yeah and on top of that SSDs being the go to adds price.

I specifically said that gamers are an exception. Yes, large games require a ton of space, but most people don't install multiple large games. Most just play Minecraft or Fortnite, which don't take up 100s of gigabytes.

 

And the people I know whose job requires working with large files not only have the option to store them at work, but are generally required to. I have a friend who's an engineer, and he doesn't have any of his work permanently stored on his computer. I know from experience, because when his hard drive was failing, he had me back up his personal files to one of my drives, and there was under 100GB worth; mostly music and some photos.

 

The biggest storage need for most people is pictures. My mom, for example, has thousands of pictures. However, they all fit comfortably on the 320GB HDD in her laptop, along with all her downloaded knitting patterns, which do take up several gigabytes, but it's just not enough to make a dent in that much space, which for an enthusiast feels like a tiny drive.

[Doobeedoo]

35 minutes ago, YoungBlade said:

I specifically said that gamers are an exception. Yes, large games require a ton of space, but most people don't install multiple large games. Most just play Minecraft or Fortnite, which don't take up 100s of gigabytes.

 

And the people I know whose job requires working with large files not only have the option to store them at work, but are generally required to. I have a friend who's an engineer, and he doesn't have any of his work permanently stored on his computer. I know from experience, because when his hard drive was failing, he had me back up his personal files to one of my drives, and there was under 100GB worth; mostly music and some photos.

 

The biggest storage need for most people is pictures. My mom, for example, has thousands of pictures. However, they all fit comfortably on the 320GB HDD in her laptop, along with all her downloaded knitting patterns, which do take up several gigabytes, but it's just not enough to make a dent in that much space, which for an enthusiast feels like a tiny drive.

It all depends, though software be it games, videos and such definitely is getting larger and SSDs are more pricey vs HDD GB/$ too. 
The 'everyday use' really can mean a lot of things to different people. Maybe a general or a casual user would be a better fit. Those maybe needing up to TB at most for example and some say that just use phone use storage they have and use Cloud for everything.

[SamucaFO]

I dont know anyone that can survive with only 1TB for everything that uses the pc actively. The only kind of people that i know that can have even 250GB and not feel agonized is people that have notebook almost as an ornament and only turn it on at each solar eclipse.

 

[YoungBlade]

29 minutes ago, SamucaFO said:

I dont know anyone that can survive with only 1TB for everything that uses the pc actively. The only kind of people that i know that can have even 250GB and not feel agonized is people that have notebook almost as an ornament and only turn it on at each solar eclipse.

 

Both of my parents use their computers daily. They regularly sell things online, and so are taking and storing hundreds of photos. My dad also stores hundreds of CDs worth of music from his collection on his computer. My mom has personal family photos and probably hundreds of free knitting patterns she's gotten over the years from Ravelry.

 

Neither uses more than 150 GBs.

 

Their computers are not "ornaments." They are tools being used as often as they are used by most enthusiasts. They just use them differently from you.

[SamucaFO]

56 minutes ago, YoungBlade said:

Both of my parents use their computers daily. They regularly sell things online, and so are taking and storing hundreds of photos. My dad also stores hundreds of CDs worth of music from his collection on his computer. My mom has personal family photos and probably hundreds of free knitting patterns she's gotten over the years from Ravelry.

 

Neither uses more than 150 GBs.

 

Their computers are not "ornaments." They are tools being used as often as they are used by most enthusiasts. They just use them differently from you.

Off topic:

I dont understand what are you talking about. I dont know your parents and about your life experience, im only writing exactly about my experience (People that I really know personally).

I dont understand if you tough i was in some absurdly way trying to be indirectly / directly / tangentially offensive to you or your are only trolling forcing your life experience as everybody's experience and this topic inst really to discuss about it and only to make everybody be a "yes,man" to your facts.

If is the first,"Sorry?", that wasn't what I've expect to mean. If is the second the only thing i have to say is "No,man".

===============================================================

On topic:

When i was young +-120MiB was a lot (a looooooooooooooot) of capacity (Windows 3.11 was installed from one 1.44mib diskette). Nowadays i would need a raid 0 or a pool with more than 10 HDs this size for a full HD film in MKV format.

I have Dozens of GiB with only photos and videos of my family (have a really happy big family with a lot of social / familiar events) and of travels.Its not something uncommon with thousands of 4k photos and hundreds of 4k videos if both my wife and I have a big family with a lot of social events and travels at least two times a year (traveled before COVID ) and like to take photos in high quality.Even the simplest smartphone can take a good 4k photo today. So from all my family's personal experience 1TB is too low in data capacity for our media.

 

[YoungBlade]

7 minutes ago, SamucaFO said:

Off topic:

I dont understand what are you talking about. I dont know your parents and about your life experience, im only writing exactly about my experience (People that I really know personally).

I dont understand if you tough i was in some absurdly way trying to be indirectly / directly / tangentially offensive to you or your are only trolling forcing your life experience as everybody's experience and this topic inst really to discuss about it and only to make everybody be a "yes,man" to your facts.

If is the first,"Sorry?", that wasn't what I've expect to mean. If is the second the only thing i have to say is "No,man".

===============================================================

On topic:

When i was young +-120MiB was a lot (a looooooooooooooot) of capacity (Windows 3.11 was installed from one 1.44mib diskette). Nowadays i would need a raid 0 or a pool with more than 10 HDs this size for a full HD film in MKV format.

I have Dozens of GiB with only photos and videos of my family (have a really happy big family with a lot of social / familiar events) and of travels.Its not something uncommon with thousands of 4k photos and hundreds of 4k videos if both my wife and I have a big family with a lot of social events and travels at least two times a year (traveled before COVID ) and like to take photos in high quality.Even the simplest smartphone can take a good 4k photo today. So from all my family's personal experience 1TB is too low in data capacity for our media.

 

I didn't think you were trying to be intentionally offensive to me, but now I kinda do. Why are you using huge colored text and emojis?

[SamucaFO]

It is only focus that i was talking about my experience, since i think you could though i was writing my text as the universal truth, which i know it isn't the everybody's reality.

I had some doubt if you really took it as something offensive / personal to you or used something that became confusing to use against me because of the way you've put this at the end: (Their computers are not "ornaments." They are tools being used as often as they are used by most enthusiasts. They just use them differently from you. )

It is kind like tough you took it a few of my words as something personal or was trolling me because i wrote something different than yours experience.

 

I´ve only used "ornament" because the people that i know that don't have a lot of data almost not uses his own computer.

 

 

 

[Mark Kaine]

Talk with me about that when 20TB SSD cost 100 bucks...

 

Seriously i play games,  with mods you can easily use up 100-200GB per game, i record a lot (and am too lazy to compress most of it afterwards) 5GB for 10-15 minutes footage is "normal"... plus lots of other stuff i don't even do much like music editing (wav files take a lot of space...)

 

No, 20TB wouldn't be enough,  but its the absolute minimum I could say its "good enough" for a year or so.

 

So yeah if you just browse the internet,  watch yt, play a few games once in a while you can probably somehow get by,  but generally i find the notion 1TB (???) is enough for anything rather disturbing (and not sure if serious...)

 

 

On 9/15/2021 at 6:06 PM, YoungBlade said:

so are taking and storing hundreds of photos. My dad also stores hundreds of CDs worth of music from his collection

And this if funny enough exactly stuff that doesn't take much storage space at all (cds usually get converted to mp3 or similar,  which are tiny compared to the original wav files and fotos generally just dont take much space) 

 

 

On 9/14/2021 at 3:52 PM, YoungBlade said:

But could 1TB actually be good enough for most people for the forseeable future?

Change this to "some" and i agree... 

 

I mean i guess it depends, but generally i would say no, for the DIY crowd especially it can never be enough.

[tikker]

My worklaptop has 512 GB and I can use that comfortably. The data I work with is in the few TB range, so it's not feasible to work with that on my laptop anyway. This is all stored on clusters or large compute nodes with ample resources, which some might say is cheating, but just the nature of the job. After it's reduced to a couple dozen to a few hundred GB I can do most things on my laptop comfortably.

 

My not-work PC still has its original 128 GB drive for OS and documents, which I do want to upgrade to 512 GB, but I can't see myself using more there either for a while. Games and whatnot are on separate 2 TB drive. That one doesn't need to be huge either, because I don't keep my entire Steam library installed at all times. It's like a dozen games at a time maybe. Movies and stuff are on a separate big NAS.

 

For everyday use I also think we have reached the sweet spot. I don't think there will be many (laptop suitable) jobs where a 512 GB - 1 TB laptop won't suffice anymore that doesn't have a better alternative solution to it such as storing it on company servers or offering heavy duty workstations. There lies the crux of this question I think. It's not a "1 TB is enough for everyone", it's that you can daily drive it comfortably doing what needs to be done. The rest such as photos, games etc. are all specific storage projects that those people nowadays will have a solution for, be it a 6 TB drive in their gaming PC or a small 2 TB NAS.

On 9/16/2021 at 11:31 PM, Mark Kaine said:

but generally i find the notion 1TB (???) is enough for anything rather disturbing (and not sure if serious..

That's also not what's being said. Enthusiasts wanting tons of games, tons of movies, tons of photos will of course need more at some point. As per above I think it's fine. The reason it's fine is also because everything has quite a bit of storate nowadays. Your console stores its games, all your photos live on your phone or the cloud. movies and shows are streamed. While in total people may be using more than 1 TB, it's not all on the same machine. I think it's a "no, but yes" type of situation.

On 9/16/2021 at 11:31 PM, Mark Kaine said:

fotos generally just dont take much space

Eh, they can add up. My RAWs are ~20 MB per shot so a night of shooting astro pics with many shots adds up. If you're a photographer that shoots many a day it still adds up to a substantial amount.