How much Hard Drive space is enough?

PABank · 07-04-2010, 12:51 AM

Will 256 Gb be enough for average college use?

Big Cat · 07-04-2010, 01:46 AM

Documents like essays won't take up very much space at all. If you have alot of media, you can always buy an external Hard Drive. With the space, It sounds like its a Solid State Drive located in a laptop. SSDs are great because they're much faster and durable than normal Hard Disk Drives. Its a great investment if your able to afford it.

r31ncarnat3d · 07-04-2010, 12:07 PM

It depends on what you use it for.

For me, I have the following space usage:

Laptop- 30GB SSD. School use laptop, with Word/Ppt/Excel/OneNote/Outlook 2007, Photoshop CS4, Google Chrome, Trillian, GTalk, and Audiosurf; they all take up about 25 GBs total. I have literally hundreds of documents and such taking up another 2GBs, as each document is only a few kilobytes in size.

Desktop- 1TB HDD. Gaming desktop. Has all my games, programs, music, and videos. Too much to list. Most of my space is used up by my programs, as each game is ~5-15GBs.

Externals- 2TB HDD. Storage external, contains all my program disk images, music, photos, videos, movies, tv shows, and backups of all my documents. Most of the space is used up by my movies and programs.

Hope that helps you out a bit. For me, a good general rule of thumb is:

School use = 40GBs
+Music =160GBs
+Videos/Pictures= 250GBs

aStyle · 07-05-2010, 12:29 PM

Pictures, movies, and uncompressed media files take up the most space. HD space also depends on your habits. Do you carefully chose things to download and delete them afterwards? Or do you download a lot and keep them "just in case"?

Although all laptops come with like 320+ GB of hard drive nowdays. Plenty.
SSD's are a different matter.

fortify · 07-05-2010, 05:11 PM

256 is more than enough for anything

mitchamafied · 07-05-2010, 05:32 PM

It should be enough no problem. And I don't think 160gigs is a good estimate for music. I have a lot and its only about 35gigs.

user_007 · 07-05-2010, 06:33 PM

Probably ripped to mp3 too. I rip all of my music to flac, uses about 250-300 mb per CD. So I have a solid 100+ gigs for music.

Add in any movies you may have (at about 4 gigs apiece) and it starts using space really quick. I occasionally use an HD camcorder and about 2 hours of video from that takes about 15 gigs. But an external is usually best for that...you don't have to carry all of that around with you.

I have a 320 gig in my laptop, I have about 280 gigs full. Plus 500 gb filled on a 1 TB external.

r31ncarnat3d · 07-06-2010, 05:48 PM

Quote:

It should be enough no problem. And I don't think 160gigs is a good estimate for music. I have a lot and its only about 35gigs.

I should have added that my estimates are for enthusiasts in those fields, not mainstream users. When I say 160GBs for music, I mean audiophiles who need FLAC and cannot stand 320kbps mp3s

With FLAC or other lossless files, you can easily fill up a 160GB HDD with music.

Quote:

I rip all of my music to flac, uses about 250-300 mb per CD. So I have a solid 100+ gigs for music.

Add in any movies you may have (at about 4 gigs apiece) and it starts using space really quick. I occasionally use an HD camcorder and about 2 hours of video from that takes about 15 gigs. But an external is usually best for that...you don't have to carry all of that around with you.

I have a 320 gig in my laptop, I have about 280 gigs full. Plus 500 gb filled on a 1 TB external.

Exactly what I was thinking.

darkdream · 07-06-2010, 08:17 PM

Unless you store videos you will be fine.