HARD DRIVES Storage stretches to fit expanding data

Digital video is a major culprit in eating up gigabytes.
HARTFORD COURANT
In the attic, in the garage, in the shed or in the basement, you just can't have too much storage. The same goes for personal computing.
It's long past the days when we marveled about how quickly we filled up those once seemingly bottomless 1-, 2- and 5-gigabyte hard drives.
The reality is that having available hard-drive space is only a temporary condition. No matter how big a new drive is, you'll find a way to fill it -- and probably quite soon.
Software was the original culprit. Modern operating systems and advanced programs swallowed up megabytes by the dozens.
But over time, most people find they use only a relative handful of software programs: a Web browser and e-mail program, a word processor and spreadsheet, a financial-management program and a photo editor.
What's gobbling up the gigabytes now is data. E-mail, digital photos, song files and, increasingly, digital video are migrating to the hard drive. It's a trend sure to accelerate as high-capacity DVD drives and DVD burners replace their CD-ROM counterparts.
Fortunately, hard-drive makers are keeping up with our voracious appetite for storage. The latest hard drives offer acres of space at prices once reserved for a box of floppy disks.
For larger drives, prices have dropped below the $1-a-gigabyte level and are continuing to fall. Just this month, retailers were advertising an 80-gigabyte drive for $60 ($40 after rebate) and a 200-gigabyte drive for $130.
Comparing the data
As usual, that sounds bottomless. What, you may wonder, could anyone possibly do with 200 gigabytes? But look around, and you'll see how data is already swelling to soak up this available space.
Digital cameras, which once took 1-megapixel photos, now are growing in popularity in the 5-megapixel category. Yes, the photos are much more detailed than before. They're also several times as big.
Meanwhile, the explosion in digital music continues. Apple Computer this week announced that its iTunes online music service has marked its 50 millionth song download. That doesn't include the millions of songs being given away for free in a promotion with Pepsi. All that music, and millions of other songs ripped or downloaded from elsewhere, is now clogging somebody's hard drive.
But the real storage-killer is digital video. The rule of thumb is that an hour's worth of digital video occupies about 13 gigabytes of space. So that "bottomless" 200-gigabyte drive would hold only about 15 hours of programming -- or about a season's worth of "The Sopranos."
Sure, you'll be burning that stuff onto DVD for long-term storage eventually. But meanwhile, having a couple of hundred gigabytes available could come in handy, especially if you're dealing with home videos that may need editing.
Compact storage
Hard drives aren't just getting bigger; they're also getting smaller -- at least physically.
According to news reports, the Guinness Book of World Records has now certified a 4-gigabyte hard drive made by Japan's Toshiba Corp. as the world's smallest. At 0.85 inches, it's about the size of a postage stamp. An earlier Toshiba drive, at 1.8 inches in size, is powering the storage needs of Apple's new compact iPod.
The arrival of more storage brings with it all the usual concerns about how to keep that data safely backed up in case of disaster. But this could be a problem that eventually solves itself.
If a 200-gigabyte hard drive costs a mere $130, why not simply buy two and use one to mirror the other? If only you could expand the size of your garage as easily.