Photo by Ryan C. Harris
By Jared Sayre and Amanda Moore
Reporter and Editor-In-Chief
April 7, 2006
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IT department is enforcing space limitations
on students’ drive due to abuse of the available storage space. Photo by Ryan C. Harris |
Last week Information Technology (IT) personnel sent a campus-wide e-mail to remind students that the network H drives are limited to storing no more than 80 megabytes of space.
The H drive was moved this semester onto a new server, said Mark Nester, manager of IT. During the move, monitoring students’ usage of the drive was not attended to.
When IT personnel realized that approximately 50 to 60 students were abusing the H drive storage limit, they sent the e-mail. Students were told to delete files from their H drive or IT would delete them, Computer Network Manager Chris Haskins said.
“If one student is using too much space, this will limit other students to possibly less than the allowed storage limit,” Haskins said.
Although there is not a specific storage limit mentioned in the Milligan College Student Handbook, it does say, “A limit on the amount of storage used by an individual will be enforced. Milligan College reserves the right to discontinue providing this privilege for any reason including disciplinary action or limited resources.”
Most of the students whose drive exceeded the storage limit did not know there was a space quota, Nester said.
There are exceptions to the storage limitations, Nester said. Some professors specifically request more H drive space for their students because they are involved in classes, such as Multimedia, which require more storage space for class files.
“These multimedia classes are usually allowed about 150 megabytes of space,” said Haskins.
Haskins and other IT personnel encourage students to save large files to cd or removable media devices instead of on their H drive.
Some students, such as senior Digital Media major and Stampede Production Manager Marta Zimon, have experienced problems accessing their H drive since the storage limit has been enforced.
“I had problems with saving my project, and things were disappearing,” Zimon said, who didn’t know anything about the limitation before the e-mail was sent out.
The timing of the limitation is inconvenient, Zimon said, since students are in the middle of the semester and working on projects and papers.
“It’s not like we’re using that space for stupid things,” she said. “It’s school work, papers, projects and things used for class.”
Zimon is currently working on her senior portfolio and a project for her Multimedia class and worries that she might not have enough space to save all the information necessary to finish these projects.
“Just in case I run out of space on my drive, I’m carrying a memory stick on my key chain,” Zimon said.
At the end of every year, all files on the drive of graduating students are deleted Nester said.