Don't be greedy for hard disk space

Are there things you can never have too much of? Sure. Money and closet space come to mind off the top of my head. What about hard disk space? You can, indeed, have too much hard disk space.

(Credit: Western Digital)

I know this seems ridiculous, but for Defensive Computing, large capacity hard disks are riskier than lower capacity ones. The reason is simple, cramming more bits in the same physical space means crowding them closer together. This is asking for trouble.

This came up on an old Security Now! podcast by Steve Gibson. Gibson is famous for security, but his day job is hard disks and he is an expert on the subject. He makes his living selling SpinRite, a hard disk diagnostic and repair program.

As he put it "Drives have gotten so dense that drives are now depending upon the error correction code, ECC, just to read good sectors, not even bad sectors."

SpinRite owners see this all the time. I recently ran a SpinRite diagnostic on a hard disk that generated over 3 million correctable errors.

When Gibson goes shopping for hard disks he asks for the smallest capacity available. This posting was prompted by the fact that I had just done the same thing a few days ago.

See a summary of all my Defensive Computing postings.

[Howard_V_Agnew]

I just done read this article and just done thought maybe, instead of shopping for a hard drive, you shoud done have studied grammar!

[mhinnewyork]

OK Howard, you got me. I inadvertently left out a word. You could have either been polite in pointing out the typo or snide. Obnoxious people like yourself should at least learn to spell. Michael

[jgfuller]

What maximum size would you recommend, for a laptop and a desktop?

[mhinnewyork]

I don't have a specific recommendation, sorry. Michael

[jgfuller]

What maximum size would you recommend, for a laptop and a desktop?

[alegr]

That's pure steer manure. These days, if you ask for smaller capacity drive, which is less than 1 year old, you'll get pretty much the same recording density, but just less platters or even just a single head. That means SG doesn't know what he's doing. If you want a drive that doesn't rely on Reed-Solomone and PRML, good luck. Go buy an old 1 GB drive on eBay. Whatever you get in stores is using those technologies.

Steve Gibson is actually more like an expert in selling his BS-powered software, than in anything else.

[davemooregan]

Every Windows user knows that no matter how big your hard drive is, data will eventually take all of it. Modern software and multimedia content have become really greedy in terms of gigabytes. To make matters worse, many applications create temporary and / or system files that might be huge and difficult to locate. In many cases they clean up the mess. But as time moves on, more and more unerased trash starts to slow down your computer. And you have to do that again, Yeah!!! send those greed bastards to us and we?ll exploit them! http://www.greedypeople.com

[stalepie2]

I didn't realize the quality was going down. I may listen to the audio file later. I think that, at least for my purposes, 80 gigs is plenty. I guess I don't own thousands of illegally downloaded movies or whatever it is people need so much space for.

[stalepie2]

Porn, i guess. they need space for porn.