Does a tidy disc reflect a tidy mind?

By Brian Clegg

The first professional PC I had was an IBM PC XT – hard disc space 10Mb. That’s about 100,000 times smaller than my current 1Tb storage. In those early days, particularly as images started to be stored, the requirement for space outpaced the increase in size of hard discs. As a result, there was a busy market in compression software to keep file size to a minimum. This ranged from the humble ZIP file we still know and love to a company that used fractal processing to hugely reduce the size of images. They took ages to compress, but were very quick to unpack.

Over time, though, disc* space has increased at such a rate that it’s rarely a problem. That word ‘disc’, of course, is becoming just as anachronistic as the ‘Save’ icon that is based on a 3.5 inch diskette (see above). I’ve just replaced my previous desktop, which was the last one I’m likely to have that makes use of disc technology. The new one is SSD – just as much an anachronism as there is no ‘disc’ in that Solid State Disc. It’s really flash memory, but it’s confusing to refer to two different types of memory in a device.

Because we can be so profligate with space now it’s easy to allow junk data to accumulate out of control. This isn’t so much a problem of storage as of transfer when you do upgrade. Checking out my disc space, I was using around 700 Gb of my storage, which would take a long time to send across even with a fast connection. 

As a result I decided on something of a purge and took a hatchet to my unwanted data, to be able to make a quicker transition. I was mildly amazed to be able to dispose of around 300 Gb of unnecessary stuff:

Eat your heart out, Marie Kondo. Was it necessary? Not really, I suppose – my new storage is just as big as my current one, with plenty of headroom. But it’s a good feeling to have disposed of such much unnecessary virtual stuff, especially as in the transfer process the computer got it down to 262 Gb.

* I know the systems refer to disks rather than discs, but hey, I’m English.

Image (memories of storage past) by the author

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.