Bad habits develop fast
By John C. Dvorak
February 9, 1999
PC Magazine

I've been fascinated by the hard disk business over the past few years, ever since its growth stopped matching Moore's Law, whereby capacity per dollar was doubling every 18 months or so. About five years ago the drive business began to double disk capacity every 12 months, and now we have a hard disk crisis. The crisis amounts to a bountiful harvest of storage capacity-far beyond our expectations. I have gigabytes and gigabytes of storage available to me. It's fast storage and cheap storage.

Now Seagate comes out with an interesting press release announcing that its folks in research have hit 16 gigabits per square inch areal density. This is 250 to 300 percent beyond current capacities. The technology employed is something called merged read-write giant magnetoresistive (GMR) heads combined with new alloy media. Since Seagate is currently delivering a 50GB 3.5-inch drive, the new technology will let it produce a 200GB drive shortly.

Does anyone other than me find this a little wild? I use 14GB drives, and they don't come close to filling up like in the "old days!" Essentially, this storage gold mine is a disaster as far as I'm concerned. Here's why:

1. Bad computer habits-Hard disks used to fill up. This forced users to be good housekeepers regarding their disks. You'd clear out old files. You'd remove duplicates of various programs. You'd take old garbage and archive it on floppy disks or someplace to get it off the hard disk if you suspected you'd never use the stuff. Now with virtually unlimited hard disk space people never even think to clean up the disk. Files accumulate, and it doesn't matter. Programs you used once and decided never to use ever again are still on the disk. Worse, you move copies of files all over the disk putting duplicates everywhere. Nobody bothers to archive when you can keep everything with room to spare.

2. Bad software habits-This is less the end user's problem but it affects end users. The problem occurs when software vendors discover that they no longer have to concern themselves with tight, fast-running code. Many of you will argue that this trend started long before hard-disk capacities skyrocketed. This is partially true. Now, there's no longer any reason, including guilt, to be concerned about the user's hard disk capability. Software developers just write slow, bloated code with a lot of useless features and people think they're getting a bargain.

As an aside I would like to mention an unusual anomaly. Take two software packages that are functionally equivalent in every way. Let's say one is fast, tight code-500K-and fits on a floppy disk. The other is 400MB of bloated spaghetti code and comes on a CD-ROM. I suggest that the public would buy more copies of the CD-ROM thinking it is getting more for the money.

3. Organizational problems-People don't realize this one until it's too late. There's so much data accumulated on these hard disks that it's getting almost impossible to find anything. This will actually worsen as people discover digital photography.

As it now stands it's almost impossible for people to find files, memos, and papers despite their use of long filenames. Worse, nobody has developed a good synchronization system to move laptop and desktop information back and forth so none of the files get lost. I try to keep things in common subdirectories and synchronize manually. But some discipline is needed, and the discipline simply deteriorates because of the size of the closet. There's no reason to keep things orderly on the hard disk when it's so big. Well, there is the one reason-to find them!

I've come to rely on the Windows Find program using the contains words variables. But this doesn't do much good with photographs or large mail files. The photograph thing is out of control for me-it will be for you, too, someday, if not already. Photos are pulled from cameras as numbered files. To find anything you have to rename it and recall the name. Still you have to use Thumbs Plus or some other album software to look around for the missing pictures. Each one has to be looked at separately. It sucks.

E-mail is as bad or worse. As good as some of the e-mail programs are, their ability to search the inbox or outbox is mediocre. The mailboxes are as clogged as the photo directories.

As far as I can tell, this situation will worsen with increased hard-disk capacity and paltry tools to solve the problem. In fact, nothing is being done about it.

The worst part is that I can complain about the situation, but have no suggestions as how to remedy it. I do go back to my laptop hard disk and pull files off to regain space. But I do it with abandon knowing that the files are probably on the desktop machine if I need them again. No serious archiving is being done.

So this week I'd like to ask readers to add their comments about how to rectify this situation with tips, software, or whatever.

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