OUTTA SPACE

There are people who collects and there are people who throws things out. Some smart people brings unwanted stuffs to Cash Converter or Buy and Sell and make some money. Some of these stuffs are then bought by the people who collects. One man's junk is another man's collectible. That's recycling isn't it?

Unfortunately, when it comes to PC, you either delete data or get more storage. I do not have the heart to delete stuffs like the rare music by Ustad Fatih Ali Khan, Lakshmi Shankar or Sam Simon. I will not delete the wonderful gambus music by Anouar Berahim ( no, this guy does not want to be a Prime Minister). Neither do I want to give up a film by Satyajit Ray or Kurosawa unless I can remember which computer-illiterate friends borrowed the originals. Of course I would not delete all the pictures I have taken, however bad they are.

As you might have noticed, files for PC are getting bigger and bigger. When I got my first "computer" (the Sinclair Zx), programs were saved into short (5 or 10 minutes) cassette tapes.The Commodore VIC 20 also uses cassette tapes. There were dedicated cartridges too. Later the C64 came along. It used both tapes and the 5 1/4 inch floppy disks.The last of the Commodore, the Amiga used the 3.5 floppy disk - even for the boot disk. The 3.5 floppy disk is slowly dying out. Some new PCs don't have them even though you need a 3.5 floppy to make a Rescue Disk.

Now you have hard disks, flash disks as well as optical storage media (e.g. DVD and CD). Soon, if a certain Korean manufacturer predicted, all PCs will do away with hard disks. Instead, we will use large capacity flash disks which will have no moving parts. In the mean time, if you are a collector like me you have a tough decision to make: delete some files or get bigger harddisks. Despite having 3 internal hard disks and 2 USB hard disks. The last check showed that I have 866.33 GB on my computer ( minus the space used for the hard disk system) and I have used 77% of my available disk space. The bulk of the space is taken up by multimedia files - photos, videos and music. Of course I can transfer some of the stuff to CDs and DVDs but files on hard disks are easier to find and to organise. Even with a software like Disk Catalog, it takes time to hunt for a specific file on a CD/DVD. Even with files that you think you do not need, it is better to keep them, somewhere. I deleted a long list of fonts only to have an Art Director insisting that I use a particular font. Of course he wanted the font that I have long deleted. So I have to download another batch of fonts. Thats more storage space.

To compound my problem, my expensive genuine Nero, inexplicably could not copy DVDs that I made. It can make DVDs out of a disk image though.

When Windows first came out, Bill Gates emphatically announced that a small hard disk is enough. Now even 20 GB is barely enough for the boot disk of WinXP unless you know how to place some application data folders somewhere else. Even though hard disks are getting cheaper, the 1 Terrabyte hard disk is still too rich for me. The Western Digital My Book is going for 1 K although you could get one on lelong.com for about RM800. It could solve some storage problems for a while if it were not so expensive.

Talking about expensive, my friend Razak just SMsed me:
"Last night my wife asked me to take her somewhere expensive. I took her to a petrol station"

Labels: floppy disks, harddisks, storage space