Are we talking about across ALL computers and peripherals? If that's the case, then:

MacBook
60 GB

Desktop PC
350 GB

Hard drives laying around (most of which sitting in enclosures)
2 x 120 GB
20 GB

USB flash drives
1 GB
32 MB

Memory cards for my camera:
1 GB
256 MB

Memory card sitting in my cell phone:
2 GB

Grand total = 674.288 GB

---
"I have seen the evils of procrastination, and I vow to change my ways tomorrow."

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Desktop PC? That's not a Mac :P

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Oops, forgot about my iPod nano...add another 4 gigs to that figure. :-)

---
"I have seen the evils of procrastination, and I vow to change my ways tomorrow."

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All my data fit on my 200 GB internal drive but I have three more less complete back-ups plus some archived back-ups that are rolled-over continuously (a la TM) including some free space that means almost an additional terabyte in back-up space.

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I have a MacBook with an internal 100GB, a firewire HDD with 320GB and a Time Capsule with 500GB.

Adding in the iPods, I'd go from 920GB to well over 1TB

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My wife and I have:

2 iMacs (500GB each)
2 PowerBook G4 (60GB each)
1 PowerMac G5 (2x 250GB)
3 iPods (80GB, 20GB, 15GB)
Linux box in a closet somewhere (300GB)
Spare hard drives (200GB or so)
2 Firewire enclosures for Time Machine to backup all the rest (1TB each)

For a grand total of 4.2 TB

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Let's see:

iMac internal: 250 GB
Old iMac internal: 40 GB
External Lacie: 320 GB
External Lacie: 500 GB
Portable Lacie: 120 GB
iPod photo: 40 GB
iPod nano: 8 GB

Total:1 278 GB

That's not including 5 GB of camera memory cards…



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Mac Pro: 4x 160GB
iMac: 250GB + 500GB FW
Macbook Air: 80GB
Macbook Pro: 320GB
ReadyNAS: 4x 500GB

HD DVR: 1,000GB
SD DVR: 250GB

Misc Externals: 250GB, 100GB, 60GB, 2x 500GB
iPhone: 8GB

Spare "loose" hard drives: 4x 250GB, 2x 150GB

Total: 7,758GB


Crap - I never added it all up before.

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Dude, you have 7.6 TB of storage!!! That's just silly. :-)

---
Rick alias cougar

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Forgot the iPods :) 20GB and 30GB

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1.7tb here. I only counted machines that are mine. If I added in my dad's I'd get another 70gb. I didn't include stuff like my iPod or flash drives either.

I also did not include my Classic II, which *is* networked and accessible over Appletalk. That would bump me up to 1.8tb since it has a 500mb HD in it :) I'll be adding another 500gb drive soon.

When you work on video and audio projects, and like to keep complete, uncompressed backups of your work, it's *VERY* easy to fill up hard drives.

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Amen to that.

I've managed to fill about 60-70% of my 2.2 GB or so of hard drive space, mostly with photos, video, and backups. My Immediate family has about 1.1 TB of space across three computers, and almost all of it is full of photos and video - probably 80% or more.

One thing I didn't realize is the space that's used by the OS and applications of the 6 Macs that make up this 2.2 GB total - it's probably close to 50 or 60 GB of OS and App data across the lot, if you include the games. ;)


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are we talking formatted capacity?

I have a 500GB external eSATA drive and a 200GB internal drive in my MacBookPro

700GB on paper total, yet 651GB formatted

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Formatted capacity is almost exactly the same as stated capacity. You are falling into the common error of treating the space reported by the OS with the space reported by the manufacturer as being measured in identical units. They aren't.

It's confusing because software developers use the same name, but it's a completely different unit of measure. (kind of like pounds troy and pound avoirdupois).

So, in ISO units (that used by hard drive manufacturers and every technical field in the world except software engineering), your hard drive is 700 gigabytes, and about 698 GB formatted.

In the the funky world of software engineering were the giga prefix means 2^30 instead of one billion, your hard drive is 651 GB formatted and about 653 GB total space.

If you want proof, take a look at your drive in Disk Utility. Ignore the GB value and look at the actual bytes. It will say something a little over 700 billion bytes total capacity and slightly less than 700 billion bytes formatted.

As a physics and chemistry person, it has annoyed me no end the stubbornness with which software engineers continue to refuse to use the standard ISO prefix values even though they use the abbreviations.

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Yes, but as computers are binary machines and use drive space in power of 2 units, manufacturers should specify (as occurred in the past) drive sizes in GiB (Gibibytes = 2^30 bytes) as this is the actual usable space.
Instead what happens now is that you buy a 500GB drive thinking to have 500GiB available space, only to discover you have only 465GiB.
If computers uses drive space in chunks of 512,1024 or 4096 bytes, it's useless and deviant to give drive size in power of 10 sizes.

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Good thing I bumped my total up becuase I forgot about quite a few things:

MacBook 200GB (originally 80)
MacBook 80GB sisters
80GB external (from MacBook #1, need to upgrade to a FW one)
120GB external (old LaCie D2)
40GB external (grew out of...)
250GB WD mybook (dad's I don't like USB2)
-----690GB I put the 700-999GB because I knew I forgot things:
20GB 4G iPod (cracked LCD will eventually fix)
80GB 5.5G iPod (white all the way!!!)
04GB 1G nano (sisters)
2x2GB flash drives (free just added those)
6GB of camera flash memory (over 3 cameras 3GB is mine)
2GB memory for my WM6 phone (yeah Verizon, everyone I know knows how much I want an iPhone)
10GB iBook g3 (no longer used thing of a server...)
160GB Dell (not my choice that's for sure I wanted the iMac, but I'm a kid...)
512MB flash drive (can you believe that it was actually $50 - must be like 3-4yrs old now....)
old 12GB Dell (no OS right now, will put it to some use...)
tons of GB's of DVDs (I'm paranoid about my data :-) not counted)
Ok new total is (1 min): 1,028.5GB It's debatable whether or not I should count the PC I try not to touch it!

And soon I will not likely add and 80-160GB FW drive to that stack. I'm impatient waiting for backups to complete. It's a necessary evil sometimes.

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160Gb Black MacBook (upped from original 80Gb)
250Gb External for Time Machine
80Gb External for Superduper
60Gb External for dotMac Backup

(I've lost data to a crashed drive before....NEVER AGAIN!)

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Somewhere about 10 TB. My wife Mary Ann Melton is a heavy duty nature photographer and we buy those external Firewire drives all the time.

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I have 100 Gb internal and a 150 Gb External. Both are nearly full with the 150 external being my Time Machine backup. I may buy a one of the 250 Gb drives on sale and move my pictures and movies to that drive.

I am really running out of space!!



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Internal Drive 60gig, 6 gigs free.
External Drive 1 120gigs, 15.75gigs free.
External Drive 2 250gigs, 180gigs free (media drive).
1 internal and 3 external pioneer DVD burners. All on an eMac.

Did not count the Macbook but 80 gigs and filling quickly.

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Mac Pro:
1x500GB
3x750GB in RaidZ -> 1.5TB
2x500GB in Raid0 -> 1TB

MacBook Pro:
1x120GB
1x100GB (External)

iPod Touch: 16GB

A few memory cards, etc: ~4GB

Total (before RAID): 3990GB
Total (after RAID): 3240GB

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Listing stuff because we can. A great MacOSXHints tradition..

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Just my laptop and drives connected to it put me at over 2TB. And then there's a 2TB raid5 connected to the local OSX server, plus a smattering of laptops and desktops. :)

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This is just the crap in my appartment that is hooked up to computers that are actually powered up and/or plugged into my network. I'll probably miss some stuff. .but *shrug*

Macbook
250 sata +
In laptop bag : (yes, I carry all this crap around. I'm a tech, and yeah it is heavy as hell.)
1x160 sata firewire
1x120 pata firewire
1x100 pata firewire
1x80 pata firewire
2x30 pata firewire

G5 desktop machine thingy
2x250 raid0 boot.
4x500 esata raid stuffs.
4x250 lacie firewire
1x200 ''
1x120 ''

250gb NAS

G5 media center tv tower whatever
1x500
(plus some random crap I don't remember)

G4 mdd leopard server
2x120 raid0
2x160
7x80 firewire (offline) drives.

G4 agp media server thingy
4x250 initio bridge firewire drives
1x400 boot
1x1000 lacie bigdisk+

G4 quicksilver living room public puter thingy
1x80
2x120

G4 Mini music puter thingy
1x80

I won't count the pile of PM8500's, and the half a dozen racks worth of scsi hard drives i my closets, nor the pile of crap in storage. where my Quadra towers are hiding. There is another TB worth of storage on my linux, win2k, pfsense, etc machines, but I suppose that doesn't count either.


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Mac Pro , 2 Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processors, 6 GB Memory

Startup Drive :320 GB
SuperDuper Drive :320 GB
Time Machine Drive: 750 GB
Media Drive :500 GB
Movies Drive: 750 GB
Old Archives Drive: 320 GB

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I'm not sure if Rob meant for the poll to be targeted across multiple Macs, or simply the main Mac you use. But I guess it does make sense because if your Mac has access to other Mac's drives, then that would considered external.

But what I want to know is, why are we just counting Macs, why not all cross the entire board. Because my iMac 2007 has access to all the storage on my LAN.

My LAN, including Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms, has +1500 GB.

Anyways, dude above has 7.6 TB of storage. That's impressive.

---
Rick alias cougar

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The brunt of this poll is certainly interesting, especially in contrast to how much storage we all had on hand, say, ten years ago (I remember my fellow Mac- Geeks coming to my house just to see my brand new Apple 1GB external drive - a whole 1GB for only $1,000!), but what would really interest me is how much free space each of us has/keeps on their boot volume.

I' heard the general of thumb is to maintain 10-30% of free space. My main, desktop Mac boots from a 300GB drive which I have to carefully monitor to ensure that at least 30GB remains free. Still, I often feel (or think I feel) performance lag a bit when I have lots of applications open or am running serious disk intensive stuff. While I know there are some Unix commands that can make use of a separate drive for swap files, I wish this was a GUI option in the System Preferences.

What do you all think?

Cry of Help to Rob - How about a secondary poll covering this info?

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This is a good topic for a second poll, indeed.

I try to keep a bare minimum 10% of the drive free, but aim for at least 15-20% free. I've got a full 150 GB free on my 250 GB Macbook Pro drive, but that's because I just upgraded from a 120 GB drive with only 30 GB free. I usually ran 80 GB Powerbook drive with around 15 GB free, although I occasionally dipped below 12. That's still above 10%, and I usually ran into more trouble with a lack of RAM and CPU than hard drive room. Then again, I'm not editing 200 MB photoshop documents.

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I was surprised that in our household of only 2 iMac G5s, we fall into the range of 1.6 - 1.899 TBs of storage. It breaks down as follows-

iMac G5 20"- 250 GB internal
Mac G5 17" - 160 GB internal
NewerTech ministack v2 - 320 GB external
Maxtor OneTouch II 320 GB external
Maxtor OneTouch III 750 GB external

I'm actually getting ready to replace my internal HDD on the iMac 20" to a new WD Caviar 750 GB, which will push us up two categories higher.

I remember the days when I thought my 700 MB hard drive in my Mac was massive!

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I have a 512MB thumbdrive that I take down to the Library and tear it up.

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iMac 250GB
MacBook 120GB
iPhone 8GB
iPod Nano 8GB
BackUp HD 320GB
Portable HD 60GB
PenDrive 1GB
Digital Camera 1GB
Watch 16KB ;)


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80 GB-MacBook Pro
250 GB-External for Time Machine for MacBook
320 GB-QuickSilver G4
500 GB-External for Time Machine for G4
100 GB-LaCie Pocket Drive
40 GB-LaCie Pocket Drive
30 GB-iPod Video
15 GB-3G iPod
.5 GB-iPod Shuffle
15 GB-3 Flash Drives, 4 SD cards
1.625 TB Total Mac Space, plus another 600 or so GB in unused drives in storage

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I will often mount (using MacFUSE) drives from my central supercomputer. We are standing up a 1.6 PB Lustre filesystem to attach to the world's largest Cray supercomputer. A piece of that (around 700 TB) is available as one mount point. I can mount and access that using MacFUSE on my MacBook Pro. :-)

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you are the winner.

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I do say, that's an astounding amount of data. I must concur.

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Hello , I have 2Tb in my hackintosh (4x500Gb SATA) and more 160Gb IDE


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Well I fall into the below 100 GB camp.

I have my MacBook with 80GB of space, and my LG CU500 with 1GB microSD and 40MB of onboard memory.

81.4GB total.

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opps.... I forgot to add 240GB for my Media Centre

but its
Macbook 160 GB
GF Maybook 120GB
External FW 500
Media Centre/Server 240GB
and old MB Drive in USB enclosure 80GB

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MacBook Pro - 120 GB
WD My Book - 500 GB
Linux Server - 750 GB (RAID 5, 1000 GB total drive space)

1370 GB at the industry 1000 bytes = KB

1275.9 GB at the 1024 bytes = KB



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I recently bought the Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ and it has 4 x 750 GB but it uses RAID5 to distribute the data between multiple HDs. That makes me feel a little bit better in case of catastrophic failure of one drive.

But if two of them fail, I'm still screwed.

A good question to ask as you're listing all of your various HDs is: "Do I have any data that I [really care about | cannot replace] in multiple locations? On multiple media?" (tapes, DVD-Rs, whatever)

Time Machine is a big help... anyone with 10.5 and not using Time Machine (or not backing up) is doing their future self a big disservice.

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That's a good point that more people should think about. Time Machine is a great thing, but it's still not enough for a good backup scheme.

Out of my ~2 TB of drives in 6 macs and half a dozen external drives, a very large chunk of that is redundant. I'm a firm believer in backups - so much so that I can find nearly every document I've made (for school at least) since the mid 90s on my hard drive and CD backups. My friends don't call me the "digital pack rat" for nothing! :)

Actually, I do need a better system off-site backup system, since my backups usually consist of moving data from one hard drive to another - but should the house burn down, I'm screwed. It's just rather difficult trying to find a way to save hundreds of GB of data - captured home movies and photos - as well as dozens of gigs of other data to DVDs for long term off site storage, and still keep it all straight. Unfortunately, almost all of my media is irreplaceable, so it's tough to put together a good scheme.

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4 Drive Bays = 4 x 1TB Seagate Barracuda

1x Western Digital 500gb External Firewire

2x 1TB Seagate Barracuda in MiniStack Drives via eSata

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