My first PC had a two 1.5GB hard drives. For those of you who aren't tech savvy, Windows XP requires 5GB+. I was running Windows 3.1. Then I acquired a huge 4GB Hard drive. Wow, I'd never run out of space now. And I didn't. The computer was replaced before I filled up all 7GBs and I had a computer with a much larger hard disk - somewhere around 16-20GB. And about the time I maxed that out, it died (struck by lightning). The replacement computer boasted a whopping 40GB hard drive - whoa, that should last a while! It didn't really. I switched to a laptop that had 40GB shortly thereafter lived off of that for a number of years. Then I upgraded to my Mac - 120GB! Wow, this should be enough to last me forever. Especially since I had a 250GB external disk for storage.

Well, I filled it up this week - both of them. These weddings are killing me! Let me explain:

In two days I shot over 2000 RAW images. That's something like 10+ gigabytes worth of pictures. I use Aperture to edit/organize my files. Aperture makes smaller copies of each image for quick previews (a RAW image takes a long time to load) which increases the total by about 20-30%. I do some color correction, sharpening, and alignment/cropping in Aperture and export these images to Photoshop. Aperture exports 16-bit images to Photoshop, which means that (depending on how many layers I'm working with in Photoshop) one image can require up to 3 gigabytes of hard disk space while editing. Each 16-bit PSD file that I save requires 300+MB of disk space. I have about 6 GB of hard disk space left - so I can edit one image at a time, save it, clear the clipboard, and open another. IT'S DRIVING ME NUTS!

So I just bought a 320GB hard drive for my laptop last week. And in an attempt to fix this storage problem for a good while, I plan on buying a 1TB or 1.5TB hard disk for archiving photos. That's about 1,000 times larger than my first computer's hard drive. How long will that last? Well, when I upgrade my camera to a 12+ megapixel, not long enough.

My hard drive should get here in the next week or so, and then I'll post some pictures from the wedding.