Wednesday, June 11, 2008

45 minutes = 500MB ?

Yesterday IT complained that I had exceeded 1GB of diskspace on my home directory, and the 17GB disk was full, hurting 47 other users on the disk.

It took me 45 minutes to clean up 500MB.

Ironically, the first 300MB was easier - it was a disk usage report I was creating to find out why a different disk used by a project was full. I.e. my home directory disk was full because I was using it to investigate why my project disk was full.

According to PriceWatch, 1GB of PC disks can be purchased for less than 25 cents; heck, 1GB of flash is only around 10$.

45 minutes of my time is worth more than 1GB of disk.

Heck, 45 minutes of the US minimum wage is worth more than 1GB of disk.

2 comments:

  1. Heh. It was always that way. Even 8 years ago I was amazed that the tiny disks and fixed partitions.

    Of course the would needs a new network filesystem that hides the location of data and allow is grow beyond disk boundaries.

    -Wayne

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  2. Andy,

    I would agree with your cost argument if all that stuff was on /tmp or who-cares-dir.

    But likely your disk was shared on a fileserver, backed up, taped up, frequently sent to a nuclear proof bunker etc.

    Incidentally, I use a cron job for disk usage report too... it's on my /tmp though ;-).

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