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Comment by dmos62 | Hacker News Reader

I tried searching the blog post or this thread for use cases, but didn't find even a mention; it seems that people use these NATs with something like 4 to 16 TB capacities at home; but I can't imagine a non-professional reason to store so much data.

Personally, if I wanted to store valuable stuff locally, like photos, I'm guessing 250gb of space would be enough for a lifetime.

So what do people use these huge personal storage systems for?

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I have 96TB at home, though that's much more than I'm currently using.

I store the usual music (298GB), movies (3.2T) and TV shows (3.5T) which I think is what most normal people would do.

Where the less normal storage comes in is my own photos (5.2T) and videos (2.6T), an archive of all my "rewards" from Patreon (765G), an archive of English manga translations (5.8T), an archive of anime/manga fanart (7.2T) and a bunch of home security camera footage (2.2T).

In total I'm currently at 42T used but I see that increasing, hence the 96T of available disk.

You can find a lot of people doing archiving YouTube videos, educational content, porn, games, pretty much anything really on Reddit's /r/DataHoarder. Pretty much nobody is a professional.

640k should be enough for anyone?

I need more than 250GB just to download and install all the games I've bought on Steam at the same time.

VMs will eat up that space like nobody's business. Especially if you like to keep specific versions of OSes for various reasons (exploit development, home lab environments, etc.).

My iCloud photo library is 250gb and I don't post anything on social media or take a particularly large number of photos.

Also a new game install plus dlc can be 50-100gb.

So the are valid reasons. But also Plex.

Video and photos keep getting larger and larger.

Especially with the cost of cameras that shoot 4K video coming down. You can get a good camera that shoots 4K video for under $1000, (e.g. BlackMagic Pocket Cinema Camera), and there are cheap cameras (under $100) that can shoot 4K.

I have about 2.5TB of data, quite a lot of which is movies and TV. I would guess around 0.5TB are personal data such as photographs, important documents, my company records etc.

I have a 5TB capacity NAS, which ought to be OK for the forseeable.

Other folks I know with larger storage requirements tend to be into virtualisation tech/openstack etc.

Probably in large parts movies and TV shows, both ripped from bought discs and acquired from other sources.

>> I'm guessing 250gb of space would be enough for a lifetime.

HA! God no. Not for anyone that shoots RAW at least. I probably shoot 100Gb of photos a year. Plus I’ve got 300gb of music I’m not letting go.

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