Even an entry level computer today usually includes an 80GB hard disk for data storage. But if this is an entry level computer, does this suggest that you, as an experienced computer user, really need more than 80GB on your hard drive?

Let's consider what 80GB really translates into. To do this, we will need to make some assumptions. First, let's suppose your operating system is XP Home Edition, which takes about 2.91 GB of your hard drive. Let's further suppose you really love to take pictures and use the program, Adobe PhotoShop Elements TM to fix and store them.

This means you should have at least 75 GB left over to store your photos. If you store your photos in the JPEG (.jpg) format, they will probably average about 800 KB each meaning you should be able to store at least 90,000 photos on that 80GB hard drive.

Here's another for example. Let's assume that instead of being nuts about photography, you're a serious writer and use, as I do, the great, free program OpenOffice.org Writer. In this case, you will need about 3GB for XP and OpenOffice.org, leaving roughly 77GB for your documents. I calculate that a page in OpenOffice.org writer is normally requires about 34 KB or 34,000 bytes. Assuming this is true, you should be able to store more than 2 million, that's right, 2 million pages and still have room left over.

When I purchased the computer I'm using now about 18 months ago I figured that I really needed disk space. So, I paid extra for a computer with a 160GB drive. Now, I use XP, OpenOffice.org, PhotoShop Elements and something like 60 other programs on my computer as well as hundreds of graphic files -- and have used only 29GBof storage space. I have nearly 124GB left over and, at this point, can't even imagine ever using more than 4GB to 5GB more.

At this point, a fair question might be, so what? Hard drives are so cheap, why not buy a really big one? I suggest there are two answers to this. First, if you don't need the capacity, why pay for it even if it is cheap. Second, suppose you do buy a 160GB drive. How will you back it up? After all, hard disks can crash.

A better investment might be to buy two 80BG drives and use the second one for backup.

Douglas Hanna

Douglas Hanna is a retired advertising and marketing executive. Over the course of his 30-plus year career, he created sales-winning advertising and marketing plans for a wide variety of clients. Hanna writes extensively about family finances, old time radio and the Internet. He is also the webmaster of a site devoted to a new technology called HD Radio.