I eat up more hard drive space than I eat chocolate, and that's saying a lot!
I never have enough space! I've been wanting terabyte drives for my laptops for years now. When I purchased my latest laptop five months ago, I ordered the largest hard drive available for the machine: only 320 gigabytes. What?!
Even while I am vigilant about purging unneeded files, I am forced to continuously play this ridiculous data juggling game on external hard drives that must travel with my laptop wherever I go. Why can't I just have a 1 terabyte drive on my laptop to make it truly a portable all-in-one device?! It's not even as if a 320 gigabyte drive is anywhere near sufficient for my needs.
- I offload all of my music, podcast, TV (I'm a Lost junkie), and movie files from iTunes (a total of 260 gigabytes after deleting all but the 10 most recent TED presentations) onto a separate external 500 gigabyte drive.
- And I offload all of my application support files (photographic clip art, music loops and instrument sample files, production-based royalty free music purchases, and Final Cut Studio support files, themes, etc.) for production work onto a 250 gigabyte hard drive that is completely full and needs to be replaced with a 500 gigabyte drive before it explodes.
Now that I shoot only in camera raw, a single photo and its 1:1 preview render consumes over 30 megabytes of disk space; so, I only store photos from my current photo shoot on the laptop hard drive. As soon as I get home, I take the photos off of the machine and import them to my desktop machine, which has access to 8 terabytes of disk space. My current photo library exceeds 160 gigabytes. My last photo shoot exceeded 30 gigabytes. I really need another external hard drive to make this export/import process substantially faster.
I have had friends suggest I consider cloud storage solutions like Amazon's S3. Not only am I not keen on renting hard drive space, even with a fiber connection here at the house, data transfer rates exceed my concept of painfully slow--so slow as to be useless. I actually now use the cloud to do an offsite backup of my most important data. At a blazing upload speed (for a home) of 15 megabytes per second, the initial upload has taken over two months and is still going strong!
Perhaps I'm the exception and work with far more multimedia files, which gobble up disk space, than most people. But I really believe that today's data storage options are the weakest link in the digital workflow. Solid state drives are now all the buzz. While they are faster, they are far too expensive when compared to disk storage and therefore have even greater capacity limitations.
I'm frustrated.
At any rate, I'm posting a link here to two pages about Mac laptop hard drives. This link contains this excerpt:
MacBooks, MacBook Pros, and Mac minis use a 2.5-inch SATA drive, while PowerBooks and iBooks use a 2.5-inch ATA/IDE drive-SATA and ATA interfaces are not interchangeable. Likewise, recent Apple desktops (the Intel iMac, Mac Pro, iMac G5, and Power Mac G5) use a 3.5-inch SATA drive (the Mac Pro uses a SATA II drive), while older desktops (the iMac G3 and G4, and the Power Mac G3/G4) use a 3.5-inch ATA/IDE drive. O
And this link contains currently available 2.5 inch SATA hard drives of varying capacities and drive speeds. While the prices seem reasonable, the largest size as of this writing is 500 gigabytes.
If anyone has a better solution than I am using, one that is working comfortably for you, please share!
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