MP3 players remain popular as new models roll out periodically. We not only care for the design aesthetics but also the capacity of the player to hold songs so that we may never require adding songs that have been left out apart from the latest ones. When I think of the ‘capacity’ as in 8GB, 16GB and 32GB, I compare it with the higher capacity hard drives which are in the market today. It took me back to the year 2000 (now I could say, “a decade ago”!), when I had this Seagate 20GB drive. It was massive in size compared to what we look at today (size zero?). And the capacity? Tiny!!
With a 500GB HDD being a regular drive on home computers, whenever I’ve visit my friends, what I see is the enormous collection of movies and TV episodes of many “popular” sitcoms. A 10 to 15 GB collection of songs is bare minimum. But how much one hear the erstwhile gazhals (erstwhile on the drive!)? how much do we watch the sitcoms apart from all episodes of FRIENDS? And the movie collection is nothing to be proud of as many of them are just archived because we couldn’t find anything better than that!
With my old 20GB HDD, I remember how choosy I was. I used to convert some MP3s, apart from my favorites at the cost of quality, to OGG!! Now wonder why I did that!! I really saved some MBs! I used to archive old files and compress them, not choosing the popular Winzip but going for WinAce (anyone uses it now? I don’t!). I never knew WinRAR then. Once I got a 50MB software from a friend compressed in UHARC format and was amazed when I unzipped it as it had the command line interface and the unpacked software was well over 200MB!! I immediately used it (for a while of course).
I was kept songs that I heard more than once not compromising my collection. Back then CDs were a little expensive. I archived movies on them which I liked and kept some on my drive. What I learnt from my 20GB HDD was discipline. Effective partitioning and quality of data was of importance, which I think sadly is missed these days. What we do is get anything and everything. I still don’t own a 500GB or a 1TB HDD, but I wonder how would I stick on my ‘principles’?!
