What can I do with a large Hard Drive?

So I'm looking into the world of external Hard Drives bigger than I can easily comprehend (1-2TB sort of sizes. A few years ago I thought 100GB was big. Blimey), and just wondering what possible uses open up here?

Things like imaging my boot drive once I have everything installed, so I don't need to worry about stuff, setting up personal version-control, and such.

I figure I'd never, ever use that much space treating it like I do now, so how can I use it to improve my workflow and computing time in general?

Solution 1:

The #1 sales reason is video, either your own or copying DVD's (may be illegal in your jurisdiction).

Digital photographs can often fill tens of Gigabytes, but you have to be a real shutterbug to fill a Terabyte.

Another use is off-line partitions for backups or mirrors of your boot partition.

Yet another is keeping on-line ISO's of CDRom's, either for production use (developing a Linux Distro for example) or as an online substitute for actually having a physical disk in the drive to allow children's games to run.

Solution 2:

For me, the biggest use for large harddrives is the availability to store uncompressed video and uncompressed audio on a single drive instead of multiple drives when working on large video editing projects. Sometimes, a 30 minute segment of video and audio can get up to tens of gigs, and storing multiple copies of such makes that add up even faster.