Even my parents have saturated their 256GB home computer drive with pictures and videos of their grandkids and nieces and nephews as well as various old time radio programs and old movies courtesy of archive.org.
I'm an amateur photographer myself and just since I got a decent rig 5 years ago I've amassed something north of 300GB of photo stills. Add in a music writing hobby, some VM images, artwork and a decent retrogaming archive and I'm well over a couple of TBs.
My personal MP3 collection (amassed over a decade or so) is around 200GB by itself. If you can find me a decent streaming music service that'll handle that I'd switch, but even Google music saturates after 20,000 files, and the web interface is virtually unusable at those volumes.
You are confusing "power user" with "data hoarder".
The most "power user" cars in the world, Formula One, can only go around 60 miles between fill ups.
Large amounts of data doesn't make someone a power user, and lack of data doesn't make someone not a power user.
A better analogy would be somebody who fills their trunk with their weekly groceries and commutes 60 miles total per day being considered the same as either an F-1 driver or a long haul trucker -- when their use cases for their vehicle are pretty normal.
Formula One is not a "power user", it's a sport.
A correct analogy would be truckers and professional vans.
I used to have a multi TB collection of old games, movies, shows, music, etc.– and then one day it hit me: I was never realistically going to consume it all in my life. I was just hoarding it "just in case".
I bought a 1 TB external HD, and copied on it my ultimate favorites (lossless rips of my favorite albums, backups of my favorite shows/movies/games- the kind of thing that I go back to regularly, and would want to watch again in 20 years or share with my kids), and now when I want to see a movie/play an old game/etc. that I haven't experienced before, I just buy/download it (I've also found that buying those things physically contributes to their proper enjoyment) and consume it right away, and then delete it.
I've found that switching my data consumption from a "queuing" model to a "just in time" model has saved me money, time, and headaches (of course data that's unique in that it can't be obtained anywhere else, like personal pictures, is backed up to Dropbox- but even then, I more often than not realize that I don't need 5GB of vacation pictures- a well curated selection of 100 or so is more than enough).
As for my large music collection, I listen to that every day (set on random shuffle). I enjoy it very much, and it's large enough that I don't overplay ones I like and ruin them.
I do hoard books and magazines, though. My huge book collection isn't remotely available via googling them, nor are most available as ebooks. And old magazines? fuggedaboudit.
So I cut & scan books as a background task, such as when waiting for a test suite to complete. Each book consumes 20 to 30 Mb, so that adds up. The scanned paper copy goes in the recycle bin, and I enjoy using a tablet or netbook to access my library from anywhere in the house, at any time.
I only wish my ebook readers had enough storage to put my whole library on them (about 60Gb now, and growing daily).
Regarding music, I see albums as integral wholes, so I very rarely listen to a single track, and almost never use the "shuffle" feature of my music player. When working, I just play an album in its entirety- I have about ~80 albums that I would say make up for 90% of the music I listen to (and I've been slowly but surely collecting the vinyls for these albums- there's something nice about owning a physical object containing the very essence of something I love). For this very reason, I have loved Spotify ever since I got in its early days beta, and have never gotten the appeal of services like Pandora/Rdio/etc.
I do have a quite large collection physical books, most of them on various academic topics. I wouldn't want to have them in a digital format: because of their low print runs, they are comparatively expensive and hard to find, so I have some (shameful) pride in my curated collection; additionally, it'd be hard to read them digitally because you often go back and forth between sections, which is a nightmare on a tablet. I tried using a kindle for reading novels, and I really loved it; but after a year or so, I just naturally migrated back to physical paperbacks. Not sure why, but being able to have a nice curated collection on a bookshelf and being able to lend them painlessly definitely contributed.
Your point about magazines reminds me of all the magazines that I accumulated as a kid, that got thrown out by my parents when I moved because they would just pick up dust in the attic; oh, how I wish that I had scanned them before they did so! Sometimes I want to refer someone to some article I read years, if not decades ago, and I just can't find it because it was written in a magazine pre-ubiquitous web era.
I hear what you say about expensive books, I have several that I was surprised to find out were worth more than $100. Those I just put at the back of the scan queue to decide later, there are plenty more $2 books to go first.
My comic book collection has vanished. Arggh.
One of the reasons I prefer my books digital now is I can blow them up on a large monitor - makes 'em easier to read with my old eyes. If my eyes get as bad as my dad's, I plan on installing a projector and blowing them up on the wall.
Apart from that there's a couple of films I gladly re-watch (for instance when a friend hasn't seen Total Recall or Waking Life yet), I also keep them around for another reason. It's nice to be able to remember a scene or a quote and be able to look it up easily. And sometimes I do a bit of hobby/amateur sound editing, and it's a great archive of cool soundbites :)
So yeah, I'm keeping around way more than I'll ever watch or re-watch, but the nice thing about having all that storage is you don't have to worry about which data you're going to need in the future.
And for music, there's the added trouble of remembering and finding all those titles. I lost a HD with about 50GB of mp3s on it once, messy but also sorted in various ways, and I'm never going to get that exact collection back. Just over the past couple of weeks I was wrecking my brain trying to remember what was that dark post-apocalyptic ambient album I used to have--though it was a nice exercise in memory, I asked my friends they didn't know, and suddenly one morning in bed it came to me (Bad Sector - Ampos, for those who wonder) ... it's really quite amazing what tidbits of memories one can dig up if you just try hard enough and mull over it for a couple of weeks :)
Still, this discussion is more about those multi-TB harddisks than it is about keychain USB sticks, right? Although 64GB is quite a chunk.
My "Online Local" Aperture Vault is currently 75 GB. The EOS 7D pictures are 10MB each. I spend a _lot_ of time deleting/moving photos offline, but the CF Flash I put in my camera is 64 GB, So just filling that one up (which I can do in a weekend, without much trouble) would be half of my Aperture Photo collection. Aperture has the ability to store your photos "Offline" on a secondary storage - which is where the majority of my photos are (only thumbnails are kept local)
I've taken some 2 GB Videos with my iPhone. Having a Video SD Card is nice.
VMware Images - at 20+ GB a pop, they start to add up very quickly. And, you rarely need them in your system.
256 GB is painfully small. 512 GB would be filled up quickly. I could probably get by with 1 TB, with the 3TB Drive on my desk to shuffle off less frequently viewed Video seasons.
The nice thing about SD/USB Flash drives is you can stick them into your laptop, _and leave them there_ without having to futz around with a cable and a separate spinning hard drive. Then, when you don't need the photos/VMware/Video/TV Season - you just swap another one in.
I'd love to have a 128 GB _Fast_ USB Flash drive - those would be awesome.
This. I tend to make many snapshots, especially of Windows VMs, since they cannot be reconstructed as quickly as a Linux VM. Virtual machines plus snapshot get big quickly.
Disclaimer: Saw the guys presentation at a Git hacking session the other year and was very blown away by the tech involved, very cool stuff.
E.g. I have snapshots for a clean Windows installs with a different set of development tools.
But ghshephard and danieldk are using VMware, which already creates snapshots using deltas, not entire copies. So their snapshots should already be very efficient.
VMware virtual disks are copy-on-write disks. When you open a VM and start writing to the virtual disk, it creates a new .vmdk (virtual disk) file and writes the changes to that file. (Persistent disks are an exception; changes are written directly to the original .vmdk file.)
When you take a snapshot, it simply freezes the current .vmdk file(s) and starts writing to a new one. It's very quick and efficient. Restoring a snapshot is equally quick and efficient: VMware simply goes back to the .vmdk(s) that make up that snapshot, opens a new scratch .vmdk for further disk writes, and you're ready to go.
You can go back to an old snapshot, make some changes, and save this as a new snapshot. Then you end up with a tree of snapshots, each one using only the disk space needed for the changes that went into that virtual disk.
Of course, even though these delta disks are fairly space-efficient, it still adds up when you use a lot of snapshots!
One trick I use when I create a Linux VM is to create three separate virtual disks for it: a normal .vmdk with snapshot capability for most of the filesystem, plus two smaller nonpersistent .vmdk's for swap and /tmp. I start those two .vmdk's as persistent disks (no snapshot, changes are written directly into the original .vmdk) and then switch them to nonpersistent mode immediately after creating the disks. Nonpersistent disks write their changes to a temporary delta .vmdk when is discarded when the VM is powered down, so writes to /tmp and swap do not go into the snapshots.
I should do this with my Windows VMs too - putting the temp directory and swapfile on nonpersistent disks would help cut down the size of the Windows snapshots.
I don't even own a flash drive (my wife has few, but she needs them in school) I have a single 1TB drive attached to my network, there I store all my data (and rsync it to outside backup). This disk is almost full now and I'll look into buying something bigger.
Why would I need to carry GBs of music/tv shows in my pocket? Just in case I need to watch some episode or listen to that one song right away? :)
Everything is slow, or messy, or has a crap interface. Sometimes all three. Then you take your laptop out of your house and you don't have access to any of your music.
(Source: I have a US iTunes account and I'm living in Germany)
Bonus benefit of iTunes Match + Google Music is that I can redownload my older iTUnes songs DRM-free so the uploader will pull them in.
I'm only a week or so into this setup, but I'm loving it so far - I really feel like I have control over my music once again, vs. Spotify which I'm planning to downgrade to the free edition.
The Synology NAS does include the Squeeze Box service software that can easily be streamed and played seamlessly on your PC or on a physical Squeeze Box server.
My wife and I utilize box in our house and have had zero issues with network latency, file indexing, and general performance.
For instance it's much easier for me to keep my VMWare images and snapshots on a flash drive and back that up to a home disk once a day, because it means I can use the images wherever I happen to be. Mostly that's just between home and the office, but that's not always the case.
For those of us who travel for extended periods of time, USB/SSD Flash Drives are a nice alternative to external Hard Drives and/or spending a fortune on Internal Drives w/Apple
HD video is huge - if you just rip your blurays directly they can easily be e.g. 80gb for a 13 episode series. Even reencoded you'll want to make it probably 6gb. I'm guessing you're in the US where there's a lot more available on streaming services like Netflix? Unfortunately that hasn't really made it to the rest of the world yet.
Why would someone? A lot of people are now using SSDs as their system drives. Given the cost of SSDs, a lot of people end up with 128/256GB system drives, which doesn't give them much space for non-system storage.
edit: oops, the op talked about modern games.
Additionally moving from university, internet came with residence, to moving back home, I find myself reverting back to using usb, before I used to stream all my music/video via youtube and other networks, now I download, used dropbox a lot of files, but the now I've gone back to usb. It's like travelling back in time...
I had a lot of problems with quota when I was on Rogers because my VPN connection to work could use up 30G/month when working remotely for long periods of time doing 60-70 hour weeks.
Teksavvy has never been to my house, it was just a phone call to set up the cable modem.
Then, if we start counting work files... many of us work in data analysis, and the datasets can easily reach terabytes. Being able to process them on an SSD is an incredible improvement over a regular HDD. We are talking about data so large that doesn't fit in RAM.
It's a MicroSD adapter designed specifically for the MacBook Air, so it sits flush within the SD card slot. I just put 64GB card in mine and store my libraries there.
Also a pretty sweet solution for (encrypted) backup.
I'm not going to use the extra capacity, but it's there so it might be useful some day. I am going to use the speed, and the price per X is usually better for the new drives. (Where X is speed or capacity or whatnot).
It'd be great if we could easily partition USB sticks. I'd keep some OSs on a few partitions and data on another.
I'm also interested in the file system used on these huge sticks, and the gentle frustration of moving between various OSs.
Maybe it's easier now, but it was a bit tricky in 2010.
Having a Synology Diskstation at home with a gigabit network means any data storage or transfer problems are taken care of. Most of my other data is network-accessible. I am rarely in a bandwidth-limited place, and even if I were to be in such a place I'd find it hard to plan ahead what to put on a USB stick.
The rest I keep around are just for file transfers. Although even those have many GB on them because I keep a full Android development setup ready to go to help out at hackathons.
Add in some foolproof encryption and you've increased your market to anyone working in healthcare.
I think more people have a lot of pirated content. I'm not saying thumb drives should be banned, just mentioning the elephant.
I'm a film director.
I would very, very much like to be able to carry a backup of my life's work around on a memory stick.
We're getting there. Give me 500Gb in portable form and I'll be able to do it, at least for a while. But much less than that ain't doable.
Or if you're crazy, you can get four 128GB sticks (~$450) and a USB 3.0 hub ($30) and set up a RAID.
I want to be able to put it in my pocket - sadly a USB enclosed SSD is too large for that.
Though I might want to delete some, since my car's interface for switching between albums is serial. Takes a long time to go from A to Z.
An hour of HD video from a camera is several GBs.
A single 16MP photograph is around 10-12MB.
150 albums in a good quality mp3/aac encoding, can easily take around 15-20 GB.
Add some classic movies you have ripped to watch, at 0.7-3 GB a pop.
Several years worth of emails goes to another 2-3GB.
Your iPhone backups? Several GB's depending on the model and number of apps you have installed.
The OS is around 3-5 GB itself (Mac OS, for example).
20 common applications, can easily get to 2-3 GB.
And that's for common folks. For a pro-something?
A suite, like Adobe Creative Suite, with the templates and all, goes to 10GB+.
And if you want to install the whole of Logic Pro 9, that's like 70GB right there.
Eclipse or XCode? Another GB.
A few VMs to develop/test on? Several tens of GBs.
You can do the rest of the math.