I installed windows 7 RC on my 160 WD about a month ago. i have about 110GB left. I will put about 10-15 GB of music on, maybe a few movies, and plenty of new games. My question is: Will 160GB be enough, or should i upgrade? If not, what should i upgrade to(spending as little as possible as I am short on cash)

Well 160GB is about 157GB free. OS, Programs, then you got movies, music, pictures etc.. That will fill up quicker than without the media files. What you could do is use the 160GB for your OS/Programs then Buy 320GB (298GB) should be dirt cheap now for WD and use that as your Slave drive. Or if you're using CS (cable select) that will do the work for you in selecting,

110 - 15 = 95
95 > 25. I think you should have about 15% - 20% free space left.
Movies are generally over 1gb, and since you will only have a few, the most movies would take is about 20gb, which leaves you with 75gb left. Games are usually a few gigabytes, I think you should be fine. You cannot accurately map out your hdd's future. It doesn't make too much sense to post a thread like this, we can give guidelines, but not predict the future, just go on with your life (which smells suspiciously illegal ) and if you run out, you can through in a hdd at that time, after all, hdd will get cheaper later.

lol. Don't worry. i have a zune pass. I'm legit. No torrents for me.

@tipstir
I have an ide hdd. Can you still even buy those?

No need, your MSI k9a2 supports like six sata drives, you can just buy a sata drive and stick that in.

And it'll just accept it as a slave drive? Or do i have to so something in bios?

Well usually there are four rows of two pins in the back of the hdd, along with a jumper wire. You can change the master/slave/auto status of the drive by moving the jumper wire to the correct position. It is possibly better to manually set the drive to slave, then going into the bios and setting it as slave if it isn't already, but it should already be. You can ONLY set the drive to slave in bios, but the pins are easy, so I think you might as well.

If you're like most people (and it sounds like you are), you'll be fine.

Games are rarely more than 8GB (usually less than 4GB), good quality Blueray rips are less than 10GB, photos and music are usually less than 4MB each.

Windows Vista and a reasonable amount of programs will suck up about 20GB.

Yes you should just go do whatever you want, if you need more room, just com back and ask about it.
LOL

thanks for helping

There is no such thing as master/slave on SATA drives. Some drives do have a jumper in the back, but that is to drop them into a legacy mode and run at SATA-150 rather than 300. The BIOS is where you can set the boot order of sata drives, when dealing with SATA forget everything you know or think you know about IDE drives and master, slave, and cable select nonsense.

Oh nvm, ignore me, it should be pretty simple to slave it in the BIOS.

Again you don't 'slave' sata drives. You can think of them kind of like drives you stick into a USB port. You can just keep adding drives that way until you run out of USB ports, same with sata, you just keep adding until you run out of sata headers on the mobo. It doesn't really matter which ones you plug it into either. Typically the boot drive is plugged into sata0 on the motherboard, but if you have 6 spots you could just as easily plug it into #5 and have another drive at 0 and just tell the BIOS that #5 is the one you want to boot from.

the only caveat to that is if you are going to do any sort of RAID that a lot of onboard controllers can do, then the number the drive is plugged in to matters, but there still is no slave

alright thanks, guys