Orange Planet

Once upon a time I used to archive the anime I’d seen on DVDs. When the Internet was a bit slower and hard drives a bit smaller, this made plenty of sense. DVDs were a cheap and reliable way to keep your data for relatively long periods of time. The density of a DVD is also such that a 24-26 episode series of anime at roughly 170MB per episode will fit on a single DVD. Excellent, no?

Well once the collection starts getting a bit bigger you wind up with a helluva a lot of DVDs and DVDs start taking up quite a bit of space after 10-20. I had a binder that could hold 8 DVDs per page and it just got heavier and heavier and heavier. At some point I decided that it just wasn’t practical to keep adding to this pile so I decided to move my collection to what had once been too expensive an alternative: HDD.

The price of a not-so-big-anymore 500GB desktop hard drive has exactly halved in the past year. About this time in 2007, I picked up a Western Digital WD5000AAJS for just over $100. Anticipating the space that all my DVD anime would take up, this year I picked up a Seagate ST3500320A for just over $50. That’s basically 10GB to the dollar, which is honestly pretty crazy.

Turns out it was completely unnecessary. My entire stock of anime - more than three years’ worth - came out to be just around 400GB. This means I either don’t watch that much anime, do a good job choosing subs with small filesizes… or both. Honestly I think it makes sense - for the back half of high school I usually only watched about 1-2 eps a day. In college I probably upped that number to 2-3. Even now I’d say I’m still watching at a rate of 2-3 eps per day.

At three 170MB episodes a day it will take approximately 2.7 years to fill up a 500GB hard drive. That’s a long time, especially in terms of technology. At the rate things are going that 1TB drive will be $50 next year (or a 2TB drive will be $100). Two terabytes for $100. I read somewhere that you could store a human life on 10TB (whatever that means).

Also, pic not related.

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