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WTF are you going on about? Adding external drives has nothing to do with "performance of a 'normal' computer". Many people genuinely don't need more than 250G

WTF are you going on about? Adding external drives has nothing to do with "performance of a 'normal' computer". Many people genuinely don't need more than 250GB in their computer; many more will never need more than 1TB. If you're having trouble believing that such users exist, you need a serious reality check about how normal people use their computers. Most people who buy a pre-built computer with 1TB or less of storage are not being meaningfully constrained in their ability to do useful work with that computer. And regardless of how much storage is in your computer, you need storage that's not in the computer to hold backups. Are you basing your expectations for how much storage a computer should come equipped with on the needs for primary storage and backup/archival storage done in defiance of all common sense and recommendations about where and how to store backups?

kcplate 4y ago
In 1990 I thought that I would never ever fill up my brand new 20mb hard drive
- wtallis 4y ago
  In 1990, Moore's Law was still in full swing and every year brought drastic changes to the personal computing landscape. These days, we aren't seeing a lot of entirely new classes of applications driving local data storage needs. We've long since passed the point where text and audio data could add up to enough disk usage to worry about. Video data volume is largely stagnant, because optical discs are basically dead and local storage lost to streaming (in spite of the lower bit rates for streaming). Photos can add up to something on the order of a terabyte if you're prolific and don't use cloud storage for that. But video games are by far the most common and easy way to burn through hundreds of GB of storage in a consumer PC. Except not every PC user is in to AAA gaming, and all of that storage capacity usage can be freed up quickly and easily when free space starts running low—again aided by cloud storage and fast internet speeds, because games can be re-downloaded with relatively little inconvenience. Probably the biggest new class of computer applications with heavy data storage needs to crop up in recent years is generative AI. But models like Stable Diffusion are relatively small compared to mainstream consumer storage capacities, and bigger models like GPT-3 and newer are exceed local compute and memory capacity by a far wider margin than they exceed local storage capacity, so they're stuck in the cloud for now. There are real reasons to expect consumer storage capacity needs to grow more slowly than they did in the 1990s, and there's real evidence that they have been growing more slowly in recent years. Just pointing at a trend from several decades ago without even trying to think through whether it's still relevant is not a useful observation or insight.
  - kcplate 4y ago
    I have 35x that original 20mb just in photos stored on my phone. I have 40x that original 20mb in collected health metrics on my phone. While the cloud and automatic data transfer perhaps slow the growth of local consumer device storage, that is more a solution to needing additional storage, but size limitations at the local mobile device form factor creating boundaries. I pointed out the trend because not three years ago, you could buy the latest model iPhone with 64gb of storage. Today that number is 128gb. So while we have got better at moving transient data off to the cloud, I am not really sure that our data creation or consumption is nearing any peaks.
- rbanffy 4y ago
  When I upgraded my laptop from a 1TB HDD to 2TB of flash I thought it’d be easy to fill it. I was wrong. It’s been more than two years since and my next laptop probably won’t have more than 1TB of flash.
superkuh 4y ago
If you can't store the data you can't do the task. It doesn't matter how fast your storage is if you can't fit the required files. That's bad performance. Additionally then they have to load over USB3 external HDD or network storage (which is probably over wifi!) and that's awkward and slow in both the physical and digital sense. My experience is based mostly off doing IT support for mostly non-technical family and friends. By backups I meant OS features that do system file restorations from checkpoints like common in Windows and Apple. It is also common to have these on the same computer. Even if they're stored externally the computer running time machine must have that much local space free. So many of my tech support visits are helping people who run out out the tiny disk space on their affordable model Apple laptops and are no longer able to make time machine back-ups to their external HDD storage till they free the required space. People commonly run out of 250 GB storage without even doing data intensive hobbies. I don't think my experience is unique.

kcplate 4y ago

In 1990 I thought that I would never ever fill up my brand new 20mb hard drive

wtallis 4y ago
In 1990, Moore's Law was still in full swing and every year brought drastic changes to the personal computing landscape. These days, we aren't seeing a lot of entirely new classes of applications driving local data storage needs. We've long since passed the point where text and audio data could add up to enough disk usage to worry about. Video data volume is largely stagnant, because optical discs are basically dead and local storage lost to streaming (in spite of the lower bit rates for streaming). Photos can add up to something on the order of a terabyte if you're prolific and don't use cloud storage for that. But video games are by far the most common and easy way to burn through hundreds of GB of storage in a consumer PC. Except not every PC user is in to AAA gaming, and all of that storage capacity usage can be freed up quickly and easily when free space starts running low—again aided by cloud storage and fast internet speeds, because games can be re-downloaded with relatively little inconvenience. Probably the biggest new class of computer applications with heavy data storage needs to crop up in recent years is generative AI. But models like Stable Diffusion are relatively small compared to mainstream consumer storage capacities, and bigger models like GPT-3 and newer are exceed local compute and memory capacity by a far wider margin than they exceed local storage capacity, so they're stuck in the cloud for now. There are real reasons to expect consumer storage capacity needs to grow more slowly than they did in the 1990s, and there's real evidence that they have been growing more slowly in recent years. Just pointing at a trend from several decades ago without even trying to think through whether it's still relevant is not a useful observation or insight.
- kcplate 4y ago
  I have 35x that original 20mb just in photos stored on my phone. I have 40x that original 20mb in collected health metrics on my phone. While the cloud and automatic data transfer perhaps slow the growth of local consumer device storage, that is more a solution to needing additional storage, but size limitations at the local mobile device form factor creating boundaries. I pointed out the trend because not three years ago, you could buy the latest model iPhone with 64gb of storage. Today that number is 128gb. So while we have got better at moving transient data off to the cloud, I am not really sure that our data creation or consumption is nearing any peaks.
rbanffy 4y ago
When I upgraded my laptop from a 1TB HDD to 2TB of flash I thought it’d be easy to fill it. I was wrong. It’s been more than two years since and my next laptop probably won’t have more than 1TB of flash.

superkuh 4y ago

If you can't store the data you can't do the task. It doesn't matter how fast your storage is if you can't fit the required files. That's bad performance. Additionally then they have to load over USB3 external HDD or network storage (which is probably over wifi!) and that's awkward and slow in both the physical and digital sense. My experience is based mostly off doing IT support for mostly non-technical family and friends. By backups I meant OS features that do system file restorations from checkpoints like common in Windows and Apple. It is also common to have these on the same computer. Even if they're stored externally the computer running time machine must have that much local space free. So many of my tech support visits are helping people who run out out the tiny disk space on their affordable model Apple laptops and are no longer able to make time machine back-ups to their external HDD storage till they free the required space. People commonly run out of 250 GB storage without even doing data intensive hobbies. I don't think my experience is unique.