Downloading Is a Packrat's Dream | Hacker News Reader

Downloading Is a Packrat's Dream

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14 pointsnoonespecial11 comments

I remember these days from high school with my Apple //c. I took a copy of almost everything I came across. I bought unmarked floppy disks in bulk and made a new write protect notch with a hole punch to make my disks doubled sided.

Several years ago I bartered some computer parts to a like minded individual who could 'rip' my Apple disks to IMG files so I could run them in an emulator. He ended up giving me a copy of his whole collection in addition to whatever disks of mine that he didn't have. The whole thing is less than 180MB.

Can I please please have that 180MB collection? I grew up with a //c and spent several years as a kid collecting //c software. My email is in my profile.

Only 2.5 TB and he's a hoarder?

I am ashamed.

A better measurement would be a count of unique pieces of media. With a high enough quality for ripping DVDs you could easily fill 2.5TB.

An uncompressed DVD is only 9GB max - 2.5TB is still ~300 movies.

And is ~3750 movies, assuming a 700mb dvdrip. ~550 movies, assuming 4.7gb rips (Which can be either standard DVDs with all the audio tracks that you can go and reburn again or 720p rips with one audio track). Which is a bit more impressive.

Just because a DL-DVD can hold ~8.5gb data doesn't mean its all always used.

Getting 300 movies is fairly easy.

I've got 500 gigs of just photos I've taken (and I have 2 backup copies == 1.5 TB). Terabytes are going to be passe within 2-3 years. Waiting for the first petabyte drive.

The article is from 2007, drives were smaller. Around half of all computers in US had less than 50GB:

http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=1557

I lost two or three years of digital content before.

I no longer tend to download things, especially since sites like Hulu and others exist.

2.5TB is definitely amateur-level. I am not even sure how many hard drives I have.

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