Hard Drive Capacity

[ianess]

What do you reckon is the minimum acceptable these days?

Mine is only 4GB, split into 2 drives..... 3.4 and 0.6 and Drive C is almost full to capacity.

It`s a pretty ancient system so any advice is welcome.Many

[j2buttonsw]

Well Microsoft say you need 1.5 GB free disk space for Windows XP but that is not including any applications. As a comparison, Windows 98 is about 350 MB for a full installation and Windoas NT 4 is less than that. The Linux kernel is even smaller than that. Hard drives are very cheap these days: a 120 GB disk is only �45 so just make sure your mainboard can recognise large hard drives (or flash the BIOS so it can).

[Potatoman]

go for as much as you can reasonably afford. 80Gb seems about average now.

[tomd]

Surely you're not running XP on that space? If a computer was (no offence) build long ago enough to have that size hard drive, then you'd probably be better upgrading more than the hard drive, especially as prices are coming down fast. However, if it is a recent build and the components are not all matched in standard, (ie. a decent processor with a very small hard drive) then you could just buy a second drive. I have 220gig across 5 drives (after partition, only 2 physical drives), but I wouldn't recommend a computer will less than 80gig total hd space nowerdays.

 

[tomd]

Though say all you're doing is browsing the internet and word processing, then you shouldn't need much power or space. But there's no point dropping an 80gig hard drive into a Pentium 1 machine, the applications it could handle would never need so much space. If you want a quick fix, just ask around any geeky friends for spare hard drives >20gig, they'll probably give them away.

[ianess]

Thanks for all the replies folks.

I reckon a major upgrade is called for.

[tomd]

It depends if you need one, if you find there's nothing you want to do that you can't with your existing computer then there's no need to upgrade.