Full Hard Drives Mean An Uncomfortable Digital Age For PS4 And Xbox One.

It finally happened. As I went to install my Bloodborne review copy on PS4 this weekend, I got a message. “This action cannot be completed, you need 5.72 GB of free space to install this file.” After less than a year and a half of ownership, my PS4 was already full. The Xbox One hit that mark a few weeks ago when I installed Evolve, and now it was official. It’s time to start deleting.
hard drives
Sixteen games and fifteen months, that’s how long it took to fill up my PS4. That’s including tiny games like 500 MB of Resogun, and also behemoths like 50 GB of Wolfenstein: The New Order. It’s not as if first generation consoles weren’t going to fill up at some point, we all know they will, but in this new age, it’s happening more quickly than ever, and the solutions are awkward for early adopters of these new systems.

I had a 16 GB Xbox 360, which was one of the earliest models of the system sold. And yet, I only started running up against the full hard drive wall near the very end of its lifespan. To download one new piece of DLC, I’d have to delete one or two others. But by that point, the sun was setting on its lifecycle, and the Xbox One was already on the horizon.

Today, however, the industry is different. Both Sony and Microsoft MSFT +0.6% have made a huge push to make digital downloads easily accessible and the preferred option for many players, saving them a trip to the store and allowing them to start playing before the game is even finished downloading. But of course, with 20-50 GB games, 500 GB hard drives with between 360 and 400 GB of actual, usable space, that means your systems can get clogged up very quickly indeed.
But what many may not realize is that it’s not only downloaded games that take up space. Most games run full installs from the disc itself, or have massive DLC-supporting patches that bloat the size of the file. For example, I had a disc copy of Xbox One’s Dead Rising at launch, but after a series of patches, the game ended up taking 24 GB of hard drive space with no actual DLC purchased. And this weekend, despite having a disc copy of Bloodborne, the game takes up 30 GB of space. Dragon Age: Inquisition takes up a mammoth 44 GB, even though I’m using a disc copy there as well.
While I just hit this full hard drive mark now, I expect many avid players will have run into it earlier. I have both a PS4 and Xbox One, which means I’ve divided up third party games between them. If a player is using only one system, chances are if they’ve picked up many of the big multiplatform games just for that system, they could easily max out either console in under a year.
So, what to do? Deletion, mass deletion. I cleared out about a 100 GB of old games on my PS4 this weekend, from Watch Dogs to Infamous: Second Son to Need for Speed: Rivals, and gave Bloodborne a comfortable home. Now, to play any of them, if they were digital downloads I’ll have to start that whole process over again, or if I have the disc, I’ll have to reinstall them from there.
It’s not the end of the world, but it does show the limitations of this ideal digital age full of graphically intense games that have the ability to completely fill up your system in a little over a year if you’re even picking up just one game a month. Even if you still own these games, it does make you cringe just a little bit when you have to delete them from your system, just as it was irritating when I was deleting old DLC to make room for new expansions on my 360, but it’s starting much, much earlier, and is clearly going to have to be a repeated occurrence over the life of both systems.

Obviously newer models of the One and PS4 will have larger hard drives. A special Call of Duty Xbox One bundle already offers a 1 TB hard drive, but costs $585. Eventually, that hard drive size will be standard, and hopefully more terabytes come after that. But for the tens of millions who have a launch-era system, options are inelegant at best.
While you can’t replace the Xbox One’s internal hard drive, you can buy an external drive that you can hook in via a USB 3.0 port. You can replace PS4’s internal drive, but they will start offering external support as well through items like the upcoming Nyko Data Bank which attaches itself to the top of your system like an angular tumor, and allows for more storage space that way.
These solutions are a bit cumbersome, will probably cost at least $80, and are not from Sony or Microsoft directly. But they are going to be almost necessary unless you want to spend the next five to seven years of this console generation deleting and reinstalling games in order to maintain a growing collection. And it doesn’t matter if you’re a digital downloader or a disc-purchaser, as the disk space will be eaten away regardless.
Everyone guessed that the PS4 and One’s hard drive would prove undersized, but we’re now entering a point in time where that’s going to start happening to many, many early adopters. I think both companies would be wise to offer their own official versions of these aftermarket hard drive expansions to compliment the current line-up, and educate more casual players on the proper way to migrate over to a bigger drive. Otherwise they’re going to be forcing their players to erase their own collections in order to keep playing games, and that just isn’t a good feeling this early in the console generation.

forbes.

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Sandhurst's sheikhs: Why do so many Gulf royals receive military training in the UK? A parade outside the building at Sandhurst Continue reading the main story In today's Magazine The death list that names 5,000 victims Is this woman an apostate? Voices from a WW1 prison camp The Swiss selfie scandal Generations of foreign royals - particularly from the Middle East - have learned to be military leaders at the UK's Sandhurst officer training academy. But is that still a good idea, asks Matthew Teller. Since 1812, the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, on the Surrey/Berkshire border, has been where the British Army trains its officers. It has a gruelling 44-week course testing the physical and intellectual skills of officer cadets and imbuing them with the values of the British Army. Alongside would-be British officers, Sandhurst has a tradition of drawing cadets from overseas. Many of the elite families of the Middle East have sent their sons and daughters. Perhaps the most notable was King Hussein of Jordan. Continue reading the main story Find out more Matthew Teller presents Sandhurst and the Sheikhs, a Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4, on Wednesday 27 August 2014 at 11:00 BST It will be available on iPlayer shortly after broadcast Four reigning Arab monarchs are graduates of Sandhurst and its affiliated colleges - King Abdullah of Jordan, King Hamad of Bahrain, Sheikh Tamim, Emir of Qatar, and Sultan Qaboos of Oman. Past monarchs include Sheikh Saad, Emir of Kuwait, and Sheikh Hamad, Emir of Qatar. Sandhurst's links have continued from the time when Britain was the major colonial power in the Gulf. "One thing the British were excellent at was consolidating their rule through spectacle," says Habiba Hamid, former foreign policy strategist to the rulers of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. "Pomp, ceremony, displays of military might, shock and awe - they all originate from the British military relationship." Sheikh Hamad Bin Isa Al Khalifa, King Abdullah, Sultan Qaboos Sandhurst alumni: King Hamad of Bahrain, King Abdullah of Jordan and Sultan Qaboos of Oman It's a place where future leaders get to know each other, says Michael Stephens, deputy director of the Royal United Services Institute, Qatar. And Sandhurst gives the UK influence in the Gulf. "The [UK] gets the kind of attention from Gulf policy elites that countries of our size, like France and others, don't get. It gives us the ability to punch above our weight. "You have people who've spent time in Britain, they have… connections to their mates, their teachers. Familiarity in politics is very beneficial in the Gulf context." "For British people who are drifting around the world, as I did as a soldier," says Brigadier Peter Sincock, former defence attache to Saudi Arabia, "you find people who were at Sandhurst and you have an immediate rapport. I think that's very helpful, for example, in the field of military sales." The Emir of Dubai Mohammad bin Rashid Al Maktoum with his son after his Passing Out Parade at Sandhurst in 2006 Sheikh Mohammad bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Emir of Dubai, with his son in uniform at Sandhurst in 2006 Her Majesty The Queen's Representative His Highness Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, The Emir of Qatar inspects soldiers during the 144th Sovereign's Parade held at The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst on April 8, 2004 in Camberley, England. Some 470 Officer cadets took part of which 219 were commissioned into the British Army Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, the Emir of Qatar until 2013, inspects soldiers at Sandhurst in 2004 Emotion doesn't always deliver. In 2013, despite the personal intervention of David Cameron, the UAE decided against buying the UK's Typhoon fighter jets. But elsewhere fellow feeling is paying dividends. "The Gulf monarchies have become important sources of capital," says Jane Kinninmont, deputy head of the Middle East/North Africa programme at the foreign affairs think tank Chatham House. "So you see the tallest building in London being financed by the Qataris, you see UK infrastructure and oilfield development being financed by the UAE. There's a desire - it can even seem like a desperation - to keep them onside for trade reasons." British policy in the Gulf is primarily "mercantile", says Dr Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, of the Baker Institute in Houston, Texas. Concerns over human rights and reform are secondary. The Shard at dusk The Shard was funded by Qatari investors In 2012 Sandhurst accepted a £15m donation from the UAE for a new accommodation block, named the Zayed Building after that country's founding ruler. 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Over the years donations like this have saved the UK taxpayer a considerable amount of money." But what happens when Sandhurst's friends become enemies? In 2001, then-prime minister Tony Blair visited Damascus, marking a warming of relations between the UK and Syria. Shortly after, in 2003, Sandhurst was training officers from the Syrian armed forces. Now, of course, Syria is an international pariah. Journalist Michael Cockerell has written about Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi's time at the Army School of Education in Beaconsfield in 1966: "Three years [later], Gaddafi followed a tradition of foreign officers trained by the British Army. He made use of his newfound knowledge to seize political power in his own country." Ahmed Ali Sandhurst-trained Ahmed Ali was a key player in the Egyptian military's removal of Islamist President Mohammed Morsi That tradition persists. In the 1990s Egyptian colonel Ahmed Ali attended Sandhurst. In 2013 he was one of the key figures in the Egyptian military's removal of Islamist President Mohammed Morsi, now rewarded by a post in President Sisi's inner circle of advisers. In the late 1990s there were moves by the British government under Tony Blair to end Sandhurst's training of overseas cadets. Major-General Arthur Denaro, Middle East adviser to the defence secretary and commandant at Sandhurst in the late 1990s, describes the idea as part of the "ethical foreign policy" advocated by the late Robin Cook, then-foreign secretary. Tony Blair and Robin Cook Tony Blair and Robin Cook at one point planned to end Sandhurst's training of overseas cadets The funeral of King Hussein in 1999 appears to have scuppered the plan. "Coming to that funeral were the heads of state of almost every country in the world - and our prime minister was there, Tony Blair," says Major-General Denaro. "He happened to see me talking to heads of state - the Sultan of Brunei, the Sultan of Oman, the Bahrainis, the Saudis - and he said 'How do you know all these guys?' The answer was because they went to Sandhurst." Today, Sandhurst has reportedly trained more officer cadets from the UAE than from any other country bar the UK. The May 2014 intake included 72 overseas cadets, around 40% of whom were from the Middle East. "In the future," says Maryam al-Khawaja, acting president of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, "people will look back at how much Britain messed up in the [Middle East] because they wanted to sell more Typhoon jets to Bahrain, rather than stand behind the values of human rights and democracy." "It's one thing saying we're inculcating benign values, but that's not happening," says Habiba Hamid. Sandhurst is "a relic of the colonial past. They're not [teaching] the civic values we ought to find in democratically elected leaders." line Who else went to Sandhurst? Princes William and Harry, Winston Churchill, Ian Fleming, Katie Hopkins, Antony Beevor, James Blunt, Josh Lewsey, Devon Harris (From left to right) Princes William and Harry Sir Winston Churchill Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond (but did not complete training) Katie Hopkins, reality TV star Antony Beevor, historian James Blunt, singer-songwriter Josh Lewsey, World Cup-winning England rugby player Devon Harris, member of Jamaica's first bobsleigh team line Sandhurst says that "building international relations through military exchanges and education is a key pillar of the UK's international engagement strategy". Sandhurst may be marvellous for the UK, a country where the army is subservient to government, but it is also delivering militarily-trained officers to Middle Eastern monarchies where, often, armies seem to exist to defend not the nation but the ruling family.

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