On Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 02:15:37PM -0600, J Moore wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 05:42:08PM +0800, the unit calling itself Lars
> Hansson wrote:
> > On Sat, 21 Jan 2006 03:30:34 -0600
>
> > > Get a bigger H/D... 40 GB is about the smallest you can buy today; 4 GB
> > > drives have not been made in years.
> >
> > Why? 4Gb is more than enough for trying out OpenBSD.
>
> Why? What's the point of learning how to do anything on marginal,
> nearly-antique hardware? What is lost by using a reasonably sized,
> current piece of hardware? He asked for advice & I think that's the
> best course of action.
Marginal, nearly-antique hardware tends to constrain one from doing
things too inefficiently, which is a good thing.
However, 4 GB is usually sufficient. Unless you are compiling KDE from
source, storing your entire music collection, storing a couple of
videos, or storing years' worth of very inefficient documents [1], or
doing something similar, 4 GB is likely to be sufficient.
That said, most of my machines have more disk, and it certainly makes
life easier. That does not mean it is necessary, though.
Joachim
[1] One of my servers stores such for eight to ten years, with an
average of, say, four to five people working on it; the whole thing
comes out to 12 GB, with a lot of duplicate files and no coordinated
effort to clean out the old cruft; all this in Word documents - when
using plain text files, or something like LaTeX, it is almost
impossible.
