TechTV | How to fill up 180 gig

Recently, I thought I had both my 60 gig hard drive and my motherboard go out simultaniously. So, I went down to Fry's Electronics and picked me up a 120 gig Western Digital 5400 RPM UltraDMA 100 barebone drive for $109 and a new Epox motherboard. I took the motherboard and drive home, and everything worked. Even the old hard drive. So, now I have 180 gig of hard drive space. You might say, that will last you forever. But, you would be wrong.

My first thing I did was split the 120 gig up into partitions, 2 4 gigs, one 3 gig, a 60 gig, and like a 49 gig. The first 3 partitions let me build a triple boot system, 2 different Microsoft OSes and a partition for Mandrake 8.2. Then I copied the contents of my old 60 onto the 49 gig partition (the 60 was not full, and had not been backed up, so I copied the contents just in case the drive did go out). So how do you fill up 180 gig of hard drive space?

First, I had 30 CDs full of MP3s. I decided to finally put them all on my hard drive so I would have instant access to them. So, 30 CDs, 650 meg a disk, comes out to 19.5 gig. Those of you with 20 gig drives and smaller, eat your hearts out.

Second was to put all my movies on my hard drive. Yeah, I know that Star Wars Episode 2 is tiny, but I am talking about the movies I made myself. I do not use such a tight compression. I adverage about 30 minuets to a CD in Divx Format, because I use a higher compression rate. To take a look at some of my movies, go over to Henleyfilms.com. I also had all 13 Dragonball Z movies, and the first 15 episodes of DragonBall GT, all the RedBull commercials (in German) off the RedBull Website, and all the videos from youth photographer Paul Jones website. I also have tons of music videos I got from here and there. Total space, about 25 gig.

I also recently got the Harry Potter DVD, and decided for fun to put the Deleted Scenes back into the movie. Pretty easy with Adobe Premiere, and the soundtrackof the movie on CD. So, DVD rip of disc one, 8.5 gig, DVD rip of Disc 2, about 4 gig. I keep the videos on the Harddrive just incase something happens and I need to convert it again. Then there is the AVI files that Adobe needs, so uncompressed video, about another 10 gig.

So, 19.5 gig + 25 gig + 8.5 gig + 4 gig plus 10 gig = 67 gig.

Add about 6 gig for the complete collection of photographs from www.pjcrew.com, and another 3 gig for all my digital photographs, comes out to 76 gig.

I also use to be a big downloader of videos, pictures and mp3s out of newsgroups. That was back when I lived on a university campus, and had access to broadband. Now, I am stuck with a modem dialup for the past 7 months. I used a program called newsshark. I still have about 12 gig of material I have not sorted through yet. 76 + 12 = 98 gig.

I also am a serious game player. With Roms, installs from CD games, etc, There is about another 25 gig of space gone, so 98 + 25 comes to 123 gig of space. By the way, remember, it is illegal to download Roms of games unless you own the original game.

Of course, there is also all the Windows files, Linux files, Applications, etc. So about another 13 gig there, give or take (the small partitions are specifically used for system files, so even though I do not have that much in actual files, I am not going to write anything other than system files and applications to the small drives). 123+13 = 136 gig.

Granted, I still have quite a bit of disk space left, but I guarentee you that I can find a use for it.

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