Okay, my hard drive is a bit cramped, and the Blockchain for my Bitcoin client is completely sucking up my free space. I want to know how much room I need to be prepared to lose.
This isn't a duplicate of the other questions - those had answers that were highly impractical - I'm not sure if they dealt more with the theory of the blockchain or what, but the filesizes were way off.
For example, right now, http://blockchain.info/charts/blocks-size says that the current blockchain size is 6073 MB, which is complete BS - the cumulative size of ~/.bitcoin/blocks/*.dat
is 6970 MB, and it's not even done yet.
Basically, what I want is a realistic, down-to-earth estimate of how much hard disk space the blockchain is going to cost me. Not the theory, not the "data minus overhead", the actual cost of the .dat files.