Actually, probably about 300 gigs of free storage.

dont you ever burn your movies to disc ? :)

Actually I use a lot of the storage for things like photo and video editing.

Video in DV form takes up a lot of space, and I tend to keep a copy on my computer as well as a 'backup' on the original tapes. Photos I back up over multiple drives.

I do burn edited video to DVD, but it is obviously lower quality than the DV originals, and it is edited, so I like to keep the bits that I edit out of the DVD's that I burn.

Then there are apps, games etc that take up room.

And emulated systems - for example emulated amigas with hardfiles to work as virtual hard disks. One for each different configuration.

I could probably be more economical with my files, but hard drives aren't that much more expensive than blank DVD's really (for example, 750 gigs backed up over DVD's @40c each works out to about $60; whereas a 750 gig hard drive is about $100). But I find hard drives far more convenient.

only problem is i dont trust harddrives for long term storage..
moving parts - spinning fast - getting hot...

and they arent built to last - i like to have my stuff backed up.

not only that - but when they get full they dont run very efficiently and they take forever to defrag.

There is a big argument for Vista, it defrags constantly in the background