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General discussion

How much HD do I really need?

Jan 30, 2005 2:01PM PST

I am looking (now) at the thinkpad T41 or T42. Will be using mainly for work-email. Most of the models that I can afford come with 30GB HD. How much do I need? I have been looking for articles on the subject, with no luck. Any thoughts?

Discussion is locked

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A question only you can answer
Jan 30, 2005 9:19PM PST

I can give you some idea of what my hard drive looks like, though: 37 GB total, 27 GB free.

I have Windows XP Pro Service Pack 2, Office Pro 2003, Photoshop CS with ImageReady CS, Visual Studio 2003 Professional, Encarta 2004 (hard drive install), and only about 500 MB of personal data on the hard drive. I do have a 1GB page file, and a couple of ISO files I need to burn to CD. So I've got about 2GB that's not normally there. But I store most everything on a server. So if you included those things:

Music 23.5 GB
Downloads 7.5 GB (Operating Systems, programs, betas, drivers, etc)
Documents 1 GB
Pictures 1.7 GB

That's 33.7 GB just in data. So I'm over 40GB just in things I use. Now granted, I'm not about to store my 300-album MP3 library on the laptop when I can stream it easily over my wireless network. But if you plan on using this for your main computer, and want to do these things with it, count on needing a 60GB hard drive.

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Important - IBM Drives Have Hidden Partitions
Jan 31, 2005 9:20AM PST

One thing to check out is that IBM keeps their recovery software hidden in partitions on the hard drive.

For example, I have a R51 with a 60 gig hard drive. If I remember correctly, the useable space was only about 52. I have heard people saying that a 40 gig drive turns about to be 30 or 32 gigs.....so keep that in mind.

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it depends
Feb 1, 2005 5:15AM PST

I guess Ryan has already expressed what I wanted to say here. I never really felt limited even for my work laptop with 20gb but it really does depend on what you're doing and what backup strategy you have. Personally I don't feel comfortable leaving 10-15 gig of data just in one source and I much prefer to hook up my laptop to an external usb enclosure and back up to a source and then backup to dvd. Even with my smallish collection of mp3s and pictures - about 12gb, I've never needed everything on my laptop - i leave everything on my desktop and backup frequently. Why not invest in an external enclosure and get a cheap hard drive and leave stuff on there

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Good backup system is the key.
Feb 1, 2005 6:26AM PST

I have 160GB of storage in my server on two 80GB drives. I backup monthly from one to the other, and then every so often I spring for the blank DVDs to put it all on DVD. It's amazing how before, when CD-Burning was a new thing, it took me 7-8 CD's to back up everything, and now by the time I got a DVD-RW, I needed 7-8 of those! Happy