3. And Where You Gonna Put All That Content?

Snapping together the four PCs in our house into a wired/wireless network was perhaps the easiest task. No matter how hard the flash people try to convince us that the HD is dead in the PC, not one of us wanted to give up our 250 GB drives.

But like most home network installations, we did have to add a 1 GB network server. The way things look we'll probably have to upgrade to 2 GB in '07 (Figure 3) because we're accumulating content from...everywhere!

What sucks up the storage capacity? Everything!

According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project people are spending more time online getting news, buying products, making travel reservations, doing school research, IMing, banking, playing games, sharing files, downloading music/video, hanging out!

BAM!! there goes the network storage.

Figure 3 - Once people get into the idea of their content their way - personal and shared - they keep adding photos, adding videos, downloading stuff from shared video/data sites, grabbing and storing movie clips, adding data on top of data. What originally looked like a huge storage device you could control has suddenly gotten out of hand. - Courtesy Coughlin Associates

Despite the RIAA's and MPAA's screaming, hollering and lobbying; most of the content you have on your home system and home network server isn't theirs.

After you subtract out the bloated Windows OS and MS applications, the stuff that consumes most of the hard drive is yours - your personal pictures, personal videos and documents/data/research downloads for work/school. This is followed by digital music and video clips - sports, music TV and questionable quality online video postings. The other sliver of content on the hard drive is movies/TV shows.