Disk space ins and outs
Despite the significant increase in hard drive capacities in the last decade, all the vast amount of disk space seems to get filled at an ever-increasing rate.
In 2000, the typical hard drive capacity was about 40 Gigabytes (GB). This was just enough to hold a Windows installation, typical set of the applications and their associated data, and whatever multimedia content was appropriate for that time.
As of 2009, typical drive size is close to 500 GB, and this is just enough to hold a Windows installation, plus the typical set of... you get the drift. And it does not look like the 1500 GB drives, already available on the market, would get us out of this.
For the sake of comparison it should be noted that, according to the Wikipedia, in the same time the Windows disk space requirements grew from 650 MB (Windows 2000) to 15 GB (Windows Vista, released January 2007).
The number of files stored on a typical system increased as well. In 2009, our Windows Vista installation consists of about 100,000 files in about 20,000 folders. This did not make a housekeeping routine easier, and gave rise to the automated disk clean-up software.
This website deals with the following topics
- Units of measurement used in data storage.
- General storage characteristics. Cluster size and slack.
- NTFS-specific features.
- Disk usage visualization software.
- Automated disk clean-up software.
- Disk space usage in RAID.
Continue to Size units.