T he race is now on between the amount of storage space I need to house all my EyeTV videos (about half of which are recorded in HD) and how much drive space I'm willing to buy each year. The map to the right is of one of my 1T drives, purchased in the spring. It's only 60% full, and that's a map of just that 60%, but I think you can see that I'll be needing a new drive next year if this keeps up.

For size comparison, the little violet box is the disk image of Leopard's DVD. The other big block on this drive is the collection of WWDC videos that I haven't decided to weed thru yet. I downloaded them all, then glance at them when I have spare time, which is not very often.

The good news is that "Kryder's Law," which is like Moore's Law for hard drive space, is being followed nicely, and the needs of EyeTV are fixed per video at a given quality, so the exponential drive space graph seems like it should handily beat the roughly linear pace of my recording. But, my future habits are probably far from linear. Once I have more space, I'll probably just tell it to record whole series of programs automatically. Should be an interesting race.

I remember thinking, once my audio archives started to seem small compared to drive size, that it'll be quite some time before I fill these 1T drives I bought. Ha! Still, a hard drive is much much smaller than the piles of VHS tapes I still have in the other room.

Image of drive space created using the nifty Disk Inventory X program.