Saturday 2 August 2003

Pic of the day: Of course, the hard disk is not the only chaotic thing here at the Chaos Node. Even on my desk, things seem to disappear as if by magic ...

Greedy hard disk

Someone famously said this, but not famously enough, for I have forgotten who. "A hard disk, no matter its size, will be full within 6 months."

Certainly this hard disk has been full since it was less than 6 months old. The last couple of weeks the hard disk light has been on constantly, and I cannot even say for sure whether this is a problem with the lights or whether the disk actually is running constantly. Probably the lights, because usually the performance is as before. Usually but not always. Sometimes it slows down or pauses. As well it should, when there is only 2.5 gigabytes left of the original 60.

Yes, I have emptied the trash can, deleted temporary files, compressed files that haven't been used in a while. Still, available disk space keeps sliding.

***

Well of course the disk is full, you may say, when I'm almost daily downloading some Japanese animation. The size of these vary, but 150 megabytes is not uncommon for one episode. Although I do burn them to CD-ROM (and lately to DVD+R), I try to gather a whole series or a whole DVD - whichever comes first - before I burn them. (The problem is that several fansub groups compete at translating the same series. The fastest are not necessarily the best; and from time to time, one group takes a pause or simply abandons the project. You could end up with a disk with several different translations. Yes, it makes a difference.) I have had to abandon that convenience now, and start to burn them when I have more than a gigabyte in one series. Recently I bought a rewritable DVD for this purpose. Still, there seems to be a black hole in my hard disk.

And no, it's not virus, worms, adware, spyware etc. I have Norton AntiVirus running and updating regularly; it does sometimes point at ugly things in my mailbox, but those are things I don't look at anyway. And I don't download warez, "funny" programs, "risque" screensavers and so on. When I download programs they tend to be from SourceForge. I dare say they are unlikely to contain anything dubious ... more so than Windows itself, as they have a more open test/review process than Microsoft have.

I took a look at the main folders on my C: drive, and to my animazement I found that the anime download folder only took up about 15 gigabytes. Now that may not sound "only" to those who remember the IBM PC/AT. But my hard disk is 60 gigabytes, of which 55 are visible to the user. (The rest is Windows' install disks, I believe ... Windows seems able to pull drivers from thin air when I add hardware.) So, what happened to the other 40 gigabytes?

Well, there are games. I have made no secret of playing a couple huge games - in fact, this is part of their appeal, to be able to do many different things. And Mythic (Dark Age of Camelot) weighs in with 2-3 gigabytes; that is included the separate European version with 3 languages, and the Shrouded Isles expansion pack for both the American and European version, plus later patches and the Foundations expansion for the US version. So I'm not complaining. Most of the other games, including Morrowind (with the Tribunal expansion pack) and The Sims (with all expansion packs except Unleashed) are in the Program Files folder. This one racks up ca 7 gigabytes. That's a lot, but we still miss half my hard disk.

Windows itself reports nearly 2 gigabytes, which was a lot just a few years ago, but hardly today. So the fact remains that a huge chunk of disk space is not accounted for. Perhaps a third or more of my disk, just gone. I find that unlikely. Perhaps there is something wrong with the reporting? The "program files" folder in particular has so many sub- folders that it is easy to imagine Windows just giving up counting them all. It sure takes its time. Or perhaps Windows does not report its most unofficial system files ... I just found that there were 6 gigabytes of system restore points. I guess that's a bit generous: I may want to restore windows from a botched experiment (I have done so before) but not to what it was last Christmas!

***

I guess I could just format the hard disk and install Windows again. And install the games again and download all the patches again ... And install all the other programs again ... Then I would find out for sure. But that's a lot of work, and it is quite likely that I would end up with the same again. If not at once, then after a little while.

What I'd really need is an external hard disk, preferably a big one, but not necessarily fast. USB 2.0 would be fast enough and the most convenient. I could of course buy a new machine with 120 or 180 GB disk. These are finally coming down to a reasonable price. North Corporation has them at a really nice price actually. But I feel it kinda shameful to abandon a perfectly good computer just because its disk is full. In fact, the rest of the computer is well beyond my needs for the foreseeable future (that is, until City of Heroes goes beta ...)