1) Coders, not designers
2) Use machine only for production, nothing "fun"
Do you ever feel the need for going above 256 G?
I have 3 operating systems installed- Win10, Win7, Arch, About 20GB of media, Office 2015, etc on my primary production machine but I'm still using less than 120 GB. I'm asking because I'm wondering if any developer has a reason to not go for sub-100$ SSD ~ 256 GB and instead opt for 4TB of HDD?
I also had another machine solely dedicated to running VMs. I had a scheduled script every morning that would create a VM from the daily build of my team's branch, setup various tools on it, and make snapshots along the way. I liked to keep old VMs around so I could do a manual bisect and find out what build introduced a bug. Having a 1TB hard drive was very nice because I could go longer without having to purge old VMs.
It's a lot better than it used to be, because the switch from Source Depot to Git means that you can use branches instead of having multiple copies of the repo if you want to work on multiple things at once (which to me was always the one huge PITA about Source Depot, which was otherwise pretty good as far as non-distributed VCS's go). Combined with the build caching, you could probably get away with building Windows on a 256 GB drive now, even if most devs have more.
You say nothing "fun" but this is fun for me... I think work is allowed to be fun. It's not a day job at the moment, more of a hobby, but it relates to some day jobs I've had and would like to have, and gives me data I can play with to keep my skills up. It's valuable (production quality) data when processed, so it's not mere entertainment.
When I worked at Microsoft, I had several TB of spinning disk. Management was too bloody cheap to buy SSDs ("If we buy you one, we have to buy everyone an SSD..."). I calculated that my lost time was costing enought for Microsoft to buy me a complete new insanely high-end workstation every three or four months, complete with monitors. Insanity.
I wound up buying my own hardware in that group, on several occasions. That was terrible.
Moral of the story is, you want you lab/dev box/env to match what you're trying to test/simulate. I need to simulate "clouds". If you're working on a single web app/site, you could get away with less.
A windows xp, 7 and 10, a few Linux vms, source checkouts for GCC and clang and a few build trees, some traces that end up being a few GB, it all adds up.
Now, whether I actually need 500+ gigs of VM images is another question. I could definitely clean up and pare them down to just what I need, which would no doubt be much less than 500 gigs. But time is money, and it's just cheaper to buy more disk space than spend my time being an overpaid garbage collector.
I'd love to have a completely versioned filesystem, at all times, regardless of how big it got.
This is likely a stronger argument for setting up a server to run those in parallel.
It might take a lot of extra storage to do that. I could see never losing work being worth throwing terabyte drives at a system only using 120GB. Add one or two for RAID, one for local backup, and some remote storage like Backblaze or Glacier for best results. The backups would just keep the current versions or periodic snapshots to reduce cost.
Note: I don't know if this feature is supported in the Windows ecosystem right now. Versioned filesystem was a feature of its predecessor, OpenVMS. It did much of what I described plus clustered apps. Only difference was storage was too limited for the versioning to really go as far as I'm advocating. Mainly just posting to give you an idea of how extra storage might help you should your OS support the use case.
But this was another of my motivations behind this question- (which I didn't mention), why buy 1 4TB which will crash anyway but not 4 1TB. As people are getting more pro- I think Microsoft should lead with home RAID solutions. I know there was Windows Server Home but that's no more now. The OS should do integrated backup to various remote storages.
I'm sure they're still around for anyone that wants better RAID than what Microsoft has. Probably got a lot cheaper, too.
But I'd like to be able to retrieve every single version for desired partitions/folders and the ability to store to cloud.
I also have virtual network devices which rub in GNS3, which also take up a fair bit of space.
I'm also using postgres databases that are around 60GB so a couple of DB and I max out your disk
If something like that delays me just a day, it could easily cost more than a single high speed 1TB SSD. That isn't so unlikely because disk full errors always manifest as something else, particularly when the VM is filling a disk and its internal disk still has has more space.
Then there's also video, which is getting more and more popular (gopro, drones) with filesizes not really going down much due to things like FullHd and now 4k.
Edit: I did not register your 'nothing fun' point properly. I guess you mean a pure working machine? Then no, I do not see a reason to have a hard drive above say 512gb. Do keep in mind that code-bases grow quickly though, I have about 25gb of source code on my main work machine.
I go for HDDs instead of SSDs because it would be cost prohibitive for me to achieve the same I/O bandwidth with SSDs that I can get on RAID 0 or RAID 10 HDDs and multiple 10GbE connections.
As it stands I'm already well into five figures between computing, storage and networking hardware. Replacing 24+ 8-10TB 7200RPM hard drives with equivalent SSD capacity would cost me nearly $100k in storage alone.
All the hassle for accessing more than 2.2Tb on a boot disk when noone would have such device in use (GPT on non-bootable disks is of course perfectly accessible on most OS's without any need for an UEFI firmware).
So yea, I need > 512gig and no, I don't want to run things from an external drive.
The only counter example I can think of are large databases/VMs... which most wouldn't keep local anyway.
Really, with the speed (latency/bandwidth) of modern networks vs rotating media there seems little reason for local storage that isn't flash drive fast... other than security or minimizing bandwidth.
Coding (OS + projects, including docker images) less than 150GB.
Photo/video - Active 400GB, Archived 2TB. (Use a 5TB spinning when not in use and a 256GB SSD when working.) Various backups.
- If I were to give a recommendation and you're not stuck to a laptop, get the fastest SSD you can find. * Intel 750. * Samsung 960 EVO M.2.
Versioning may eventually get us to 500GB and game development may need some more space.
My team has hundreds of terabytes of compressed data stored in s3 so I sometimes jump up to the limits when I am doing data pulls for analysis.