I always liked MaximumPC because, unlike a lot of computer magazines, it was
not into this touchy-feely dumbed down “home computer” nonsense — this was
power desktop computing. Now they seem to be whimping out on me. In a recent
review
of IBM’s 75 gig hard drive and Maxtor’s 60 gig hard drive, reviewer Sean Cleveland
actually dares to ponder that the size of hard drives might be reaching “ludicrous
proportions.”
Is he serious? Sixty gigabytes is a drop in the bucket. I want to get four
of these Maxtor drives, and put them in a RAID array using a Promise controller
to have 240 gigabytes of storage. I can already hear the John Dvorak’s of the
world chiming “what would any home user possibly do with that much space.” I
wonder sometimes if these folks actually use their computers rather than
just writing about them.
At the moment, for example, I have about 60 gigabytes of MP3s stored on CD-Rs
that I would much prefer to store locally. I have another 20-30 gigabytes of
scanned pictures that are scattered across many CDs, not to mention the hours
and hours of digitized Hi-8 videotapes.
Forget 60 gigabytes being ludicrous. I am hoping that 1 terabyte hard drive
comes out soon so I can get four of those and put them on a RAID controller.
Don’t think I can fill up 4 terabytes? I would not bet against it (besides by
the time they get that big, Diablo III will probably ship on 8 DVDs and take
up 800 gig — just running games will eat up half the drive space).