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320GB Hard Drives announced
SparkyTWP writes "Maxtor has once again shown the world that we need more room for porn by announcing new IDE hard drives with capacities of up to 320GB. Prices will be between $300 and $400 and be commercially available by the end of the year."
Video editing would chew up 320 GB pretty fast... and that's not even HD.
Being able to store CD's in a lossless electronic format (like FLAC) would also chew up space moderately fast, although you could fit one hell of a storage library on that.
For business use more space is always good. Databases chew up space like nothing else, particularly when you're talking about data warehouses.
1. games -- with modern PC games requiring from 500 megs to 5 gigabytes for a 'full' install 320 gigs will fit you approximately 200 games.
2. DVDs -- DivX is for sharing online, real men don't recompress lossily compressed formats (like MPEG-2 the DVDs come in) at about 7 GB average per movie you could fit about 45 movies on that drive. Even if you went with DivX though, you'd need an average of 1 GB per movie, so you're only up to about 320 movies.
3. porn -- the oldest obsession, there can never be enough storage for these movies/pictures/etc..
4. ogg/mp3/whatever -- 320 GB is a lot of music, but translates to 3000 to 6000 albums depending on the bitrate used. Losseless compression would fit fewer still, and some people would seriously rather not use a lossy compression method.
5. Archive usenet binary groups -- at 320 GB you can only pick a few groups though, otherwise you'd be changing drives pretty often...
6. put steven speilburg to shame -- with today's computers there is no reason why you can't produce the next jaws on your home PC, assuming you have the creative talents, and the 320 GB hd to fit all the video in losslessly compressed formats.
7. Create a Linux distro ISO archive. -- With distrowatch.com ranking 91 versions of linux you'll fill that 320GB pretty fast trying to archive all these little linux OSes for posterity.
8. calcualte pi to the 320,000,000,000 th digit, and store it on your HD. At one byte per digit in uncompressed format that's how many characters a 320 GB HD can hold (because of the HD industry standard of using units of 1,000 instead of 1024)
9. store approximately 160 years worth of warcraft 3 replay files.
10. Provide everyone in the world with ~ 50 bytes of 'free' storage, or provide everyone in america with 1,111 bytes. 320 GB doesn't go far, does it?
Ten good reasons, maybe not all convincing to you, but all valid uses of a 320 GB hd.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html