Storage Growth Vs. Storage Used

In today’s computing world things are growing quickly. A good example is the size and speed of conventional computer storage. The average user today uses most of their memory on music and pictures. But how much memory do you really need?

Over the past few years we’ve seen massive advances in storage capacity of traditional platter HDD’s. 300 Gb is now standard in the lowest end desktops, and if your into gaming you can get several drives, each several terabytes large. We have also seen many advances in speed.

The two biggest are serial ATA, or SATA, and SSD’s, or solid state drives. SATA was a major improvement over IDE for the connection of drives. IDE speeds are limited to about 500 MBits a second, where standard SATA is good for about 3Gbps. Plus, ribbon cables are messy, SATA is thin and keeps your case airflow clear. New, high end SATA cables get up to 6 Gbps, though many drives don’t support those speeds.

SSD’s are a revolution in speed and storage methods over traditional platter hard disk drives. They support 3 and 6 Gbps speeds, because data access is instant, unlike traditional drives there the platter has to be spun and read. SSD’s accomplish this by using a flash drive like technology that stores data in flash chip memory rather than a magnetic disk. Newer platter drives also have increased speed by increasing spin speeds. SSD’s bring many other advantages too, which i will discuss in another article. over the last ten to fifteen years the space requirements of computers has increased greatly.

There are many more programs available today, which require more storage space. Also, operating systems have grown more sophisticated. Music, videos, and photos also hog a lot of space. The real question is do we utilize all of the space available to us? no. At the moment we do not. Even with 15,000 songs in your library, that will only eat up about 60 Gb of your hard drive. Movies are much larger, and photos take up a lot of room, but the average family will most likely never use 500 Gb, much less a terabyte before they upgrade their machine. Businesses and gamers use much more memory than the average user, but a few terabytes is still an outrageous amount of memory to spend your money on.

Another issue is speed. Is it worth spending a few hundred extra dollars to go from standard to high speed SATA? If you play a lot of games or movies, then maybe, because then load speeds are a big deal. You need your information available as quickly as possible. All of that considered, unless you’re going to drop another few hundred bucks on a fancy solid state drive, high speed SATA still isn’t worth your money. Gig for gig, we have way more storage space than we need, and way more speed. but its still pretty cool, so who cares?