A gigabyte ain’t what it used to be

I’ve had my HP Pavilion x360 since November, and for the most part, I’ve been happy with it. Lately (for about the past month or so), I’ve been getting storage warnings, saying that I needed to free up space on my hard drive. This was puzzling to me; I hadn’t even had my laptop for a year (or even six months), and I was already getting storage warning messages?

I checked my storage settings. Sure enough, this is what I saw.

I have a 256GB SSD on my machine. I had used nearly all of it. What gives?

Since Apps & Features was using up the most space, I looked there first. I sorted my list by size. This is what I saw.

I uninstalled a few apps that I didn’t need and managed to free up some space on the drive, but it was still just a drop in the bucket.

I didn’t remember having space issues on my old laptop, and then I realized my issue. My new laptop has a 256GB SSD. My old one — which my new one had replaced — had a 512GB HDD.

There was my problem. I had underestimated the amount of disk space I needed when I bought my new laptop. I thought 256GB would be plenty, and as it turned out, it wasn’t.

So it appears that I’ll have to add more storage to my laptop. The first question I had was whether or not I could do so easily, without replacing the existing SSD. I found this article about how to disassemble the same model laptop that I have, and sure enough, it appears that I can. There is a space inside where I can add a second drive. So, now it appears that I will be shopping for an additional drive.

It’s funny. I thought 256GB would be big enough. I remember my first job out of college, when we took delivery of a new backup tape drive, capable of handling 1GB tapes. Back then, we didn’t have to worry about storing data formats other than ASCII and numeric text, not like the graphic and audio formats that we have now. Large storage at the time was measured in MB, not GB. We would pick up a tape and joke, “in my hand, I hold the Library of Congress.”

Back then, 1GB was a lot of storage space. Now, it’s small potatoes. Apparently, a gigabyte of space isn’t what it once was.

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