The last time I upgraded I was looking for ways to keep costs down so I ended up keeping my old hard drive which is actually still IDE - gross I know. I'm currently rocking 160GB's in my desktop, 120GB's in my laptop and I have a 320GB external, which is only ever plugged in to do backups on these systems, and I think I'm sitting on more than 50% free space on both my systems most of the time.

I am pretty religious however about burning off things I want to keep to DVD and storing them, although I've never actually went back and used one of these DVD's before.

Well some people do actually use the space - movies, mp3's etc. Especially where HD is concerned, compared to a 7-800 mb avi file, 1080p movies are anywheres from 80-20GB depending.

So the space would be required for any amount of movies. Its why I been picking up drives from Steve-O, so I will have a little space for HD on the htpc box.

A true rip of Avatar off bluray is 45GB (with all the languages)...

If you format these drives with NTFS stick with 4k clusters (default), 64k clusters makes them twice as slow for some reason...

Operation completed! Unfortunately I was a little overzealeous with hot swapping and I lost 500GB of Linux distros, good thing I have them backed up...in Alberta.

I guess techincally it's only 9TB but whatever.