It’s with a rather confused feeling that I began writing this post.

In fact, leading up till Wednesday, it had actually been quite a long time since I was able to sit down proper at my desk and actually write anything more substantial than what to get from the local supermarket and signing my life away to yet more companies whom I’m firmly believing they now own my soul as well as everything else I possibly have.

In fact there are many topics of interest to be had in the world, ranging from the terrible tragedy in Nepal, which is still struggling to deal with the terrible aftermath, to how many more comic book films we can stomach before we all die of boredom.

But rather than remark on all that, I found myself at my desk shopping around the various online retailers for brand new 4TB drives to add to the Evilbeast, as I had actually ran out of space on the 2TB and 1 TB drives and was about to blow even more money on storage.

How to give Netflix a run for their money….

Just think about that for a moment. These two drives which hold a tremendous amount of data, were full. Surely there is only so much porn you can download from the internet and only so much pirated material you can steal to rival Netflix before you just can’t do any more?

Well, it seems that in fact where the storage was being used more and more, was for legitimate games and applications. In fact it shows where the future is going in terms of what a typical PC gamer and possibly console gamer will need to do in future.

The landscape is that more and more, content is being delivered over the internet via online store fronts such as what Valve, EA and GOG provide end customers, to those seeking Adobe’s products using the Creative Cloud service where people now pay monthly for the entire suite that Adobe provide now and download via their own utility.

This in turn is beginning to take a toll on what we have installed on the local storage, coupled with downloads from other legitimate sources such as Amazon for MP3s, Digital Movies where a copy comes with a DVD or Blu-ray comes in quite high too. So for most people, what will that actually mean then?

For example, the recent release of Grand Theft Auto 5 on PC was greatly received by most, but with a 60GB preload, which of course would take ages on most connections currently in place, and then this requirement expanded once certain files were uncompressed.

A standalone like Wolfenstein: The Old Order, which you wouldn’t think is that big in fact given it’s shorter than it’s big brother release the year before, still comes in at around 35GB. Already, we’re starting to eat away at a lot of space, and therefore this is something quite a number of people would need to look at. But surely you hairy hippy, I hear you cry, you should just get rid of all that crap you’ve got in the first place?

Well yes, I could do that and save money. But then what if I wanted to play a particular game one day, just on a whim. If it’s large, I would have to then wait again for it to download, and pretty much saturate the available line, in order to get it in short order.

That then rules out using the internet for anything else while it downloads, so no more watching cat movies on YouTube. Without the benefit of faster fibre connections and relying on the traditional DSL technology, it’s going to take longer and longer to get the big titles down inside of 24 hours.

What about patches too? The recent release of Mortal Kombat X on PC has been a shining example of where people can get truly p*ssed. 15GB patches downloaded, then rolled back with another 15GB patch, then finally the 15GB patch which fixes the original problem, you basically face an awful lot of wasted time and effort. Therefore running more content locally, is becoming an issue, certainly for heavy users like myself.

Transferring the old content over from the old disk to the new is also an issue for most.

Most people will not know a lot about Windows and what the best way to get things moved that are tied to services running on a system. Booting into safe mode for example was the way to ensure that everything was stopped to then safely transfer content over. But you may need to ensure everything works in the same way.

One of the best ways to do this in Windows is Robocopy with the /MIR command, as that will mirror the source content on the destination. But come across system files and then that stalls for a while. There are ways of making this easier, but of course, you have to hunt these down and in some cases, pay for that to get sorted. Not a lot of people will have that kind of patience.

So what starts out to be a ridiculous adventure in getting far too much storage, more than what most people you think would need, would then be become a requirement for those who want to even just play big games on the PC platform.

Consoles were mentioned earlier, and quite right too. All games supplied for the Xbox or PS4 on blu-rays now require an installation on the local hard disk which can on average, about 40GB for a big game. On a 500GB disk which comes with the systems as standard, it really won’t take long for that to get filled, and then people who just want to sit down and play something after a crap day at work, will be faced with the same issue and they will have to spend the time trying to go through the same in order to keep more working locally to save time later.

Maybe it’s not so stupid after all……