In general, our storage policies are geared towards making sure that services are available to all our users, and that people have a reasonable amount of space to accomplish their routine tasks. Please remember, it is not just how much space we are using, it is also about how much space we can reasonably back up.
On the Users volume (drives U: and F:) , students start with a default quota of 100 megabytes, and faculty/staff with a quota of 500 megabytes. Obviously, some individuals will use more of that space then others. This allows us to raise quotas higher when someone needs additional space for academic or work-related reasons. When a request comes in, we do make sure that there is not a significant amount of wasted space - for example, many iTunes users end up with music files in a "My Music" folder on their F: drive without realizing it. We would ask a user to move that sort of thing to their computer's hard drive before giving more space. At this time, we are using about 73% of our user volume. To request additional space for academic or business purposes, please make a support request indicating the reason through our support portal.
On the Depts volume, we generally do not set a hard limit unless we see an area is rapidly consuming space and we need to act to prevent the entire volume from filling up and causing problems for every department. We would then contact the department in question and discuss the problem. The number of individual departmental or organizational spaces is not large enough for this to be unmanageable. In a situation where there wasn't any danger of disruption, just a level of usage that called for discussion, we would contact the department or area prior to taking any action.
Course drive space is also unrestricted. Again, any significant spike in usage for a single course or user that could disrupt everyone would draw attention and we would manage the problem. Again, there are few enough instructors and courses so that this remains a manageable problem. We have only had to take action on a few occasions, and not for a number of years.