On Running Out of Space

I thought it would never happen. Even Vizzini would say, “Inconceivable!”

I ran out of space on the XBox hard drive today.

For four years now I’ve told customers that they will never need to worry about saving their games–the XBox has an eight-gig hard drive and games save to it automatically, not to mention you can copy your own music CDs to the hard drive and listen to them during gameplay rather than listen to the canned soundtrack. Eight gigs–you’ll never run out of space, you can’t copy enough CDs to even make a dent in half the space.

I made a habit of copying CDs to the hard drive. At vacation time it’s damned handy–just take the XBox with me and I have most of my music collection. Sometimes you want to play Project Gotham Racing with Celtic music playing in the background. I might not have even a third of my music collection on the hard drive, but there’s probably a good hundred CDs on the drive.

Today I went to copy Natalie Merchant’s Tigerlily album, and about halfway through the XBox gave me an error message. “Cannot copy. Insufficient space on hard drive. Ok.”

No, it’s not okay. How do these things happen?

In the next day or three I’ll have to take a good hard look at what I have on the hard drive. Do I really need Big Daddy’s Sgt. Pepper’s on the hard drive? Sure, it’s a kitchy album (the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s redone as fifties doo-wop), but am I going to race around Trafalgar Square listening to it? What about Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast? Why did I even copy that?

I can’t tanjing believe it. I ran out of space.

Published by Allyn

A writer, editor, journalist, sometimes coder, occasional historian, and all-around scholar, Allyn Gibson is the writer for Diamond Comic Distributors' monthly PREVIEWS catalog, used by comic book shops and throughout the comics industry, and the editor for its monthly order forms. In his over ten years in the industry, Allyn has interviewed comics creators and pop culture celebrities, covered conventions, analyzed industry revenue trends, and written copy for comics, toys, and other pop culture merchandise. Allyn is also known for his short fiction (including the Star Trek story "Make-Believe,"the Doctor Who short story "The Spindle of Necessity," and the ReDeus story "The Ginger Kid"). Allyn has been blogging regularly with WordPress since 2004.

5 thoughts on “On Running Out of Space

  1. 8 GB, with music, will fill up quicker than you think. That’s about 180 hours of music, at the probably-lower-than-what-the-Xbox-uses bitrate I have everything ripped to on my machine. And that completely ignores saved game files, and Xbox Live content….

  2. I have that Big Daddy Album (actually, I think I have all Big Daddy Albums)….

    And 8 gigs? piker…I can fill up 8 gigs in my sleep….and often do….in fact, in my portable hard drive, I’ve currently filled it with 7.96 gigs today..and I’m only half done!

  3. The Sgt. Peppers album was their last, I think, and by far the weakest. The gimmick wasn’t as fun with music from around the same era they “were from” They had at least 2 others.

  4. Oh right..as for knowing, I took a history of popular music class in college, and the professor used Big Daddy’s version of Devo’s Whip It to show how the melody and arrangement of a song can be changed but the song remains the same…..a concept that I’d never concidered and one of the reason I really like covers.

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