What's the Average Size and How Do You Measure Up?

How big is it? Go ahead, take a peek…OS X users, use your Get Info or check your Computer stats, Windows users. According to a customer survey conducted by hardware manufacturer Seagate, the average user is now sporting on average 590 GB of storage on their computer (we're please to note our laptop falls above the curve with a souped up 620 GB internally), a notable 39% increase in year-over-year numbers. The huge jump in personal storage capacity illustrates although cloud storage is eagerly anticipated, plenty of users are still opting to store files locally…

Our migration from a hodge podge of internal and external hard drives to cloud storage has been a slow going affair. Our sizable music collection is currently stored locally, duplicated on external drives, and is currently, and very slowly, being uploaded to Music Beta by Google (20K songs total with just 2,500 completed). Similarly, we're storing our most choice photos on Flickr, Dropbox, Amazon Cloud for posterity (and in lower resolution, Facebook and Tumblr) and to share. But local storage still reigns supreme in our home office, mostly because it's still way easier and faster to back things up and access later via SATA or USB 2 (Thunderbolt one day!) than sitting for hours/days/weeks uploading whole collections via cloud storage.

Think of storage services like Tonido as Extenz for your hard drive, offering not only more storage capacity, but more remote access options.

Then there's the option of hosting your own cloud storage solution, a storage tactic that falls inbetween fully buying into online storage and keeping your digital assets physically as close to you as possible. In reality, the best solution for now seems neither here nor there completely, the safest option in regards to file access being duplicating files both locally and on the cloud. The way we look at it, we can reinstall software and apps, but once you lose photos and even music files, it can be difficult or near impossible to get them back once you lose them, so don't buy into trust one solution over another completely. As the saying goes, it's not how big it is, but how you use it (but size does matter)!

[Statistic via Tom's Hardware/Seagate]

Comments (8)

Only 160 internal in my MacMini, but I have 5tb of external storage (1 x 1.5tb, 3 x 1tb and 1 x 0.5tb). I am tempted to add another 2tb with the low price external drives have hit in the last couple of weeks.

Cloud storage is nice and all, and I do make use of Dropbox and Carbonite, but having a full Time Machine backup is something I consider necessary, and I've started doing some light video editing, so having a large drive where I can dump those files is extremely useful.

I keep some of my files in the cloud that I work on in a lot of different places or need access to. My portfolio, resume, pro bono freelance projects. But i can't see putting everything into the cloud. In all honesty if we keep on thinking everything needs to be in the cloud and we should stream everything (leading to the downfall of physical media including movies etc) then sooner rather then later we are going to have all of our ISPs capping our bandwidth or charging out the nose for increased bandwidth.

How does my storage stack up right now at home?
1tb inside the imac
1tb time machine
1tb x 2, 500gb x 3 externals
320gb, 250gb, and 40gb drives from old computers. Probably more I am forgetting.

500GB - 3TB? oh come on. i'm sure most of the people who frequent this site are notebook owners. they must have read the poll wrong.

^ oh wait. now i realized that i read the poll wrong... a little confusing to ask two questions in a poll.

So... which question am I supposed to answer in the poll?

Yeah, I'm totally a 3+ Tb kinda guy. All disks get scratched and even new nice non-scratched disks can be finicky, even in a PS3, arguably the best Bluray player on the market.

Answer? Make backups of everything and build a home media server. Movies never skip, and I can skip all the menus, previews, and other junk they throw on there. It's a little pricey, and legally gray, but it's so convenient.

720GB internal on my MBP
1TB external (system backup, back up all files from other drives)
640 external (RAW files)
500 external (movies, shows, videos, etc)