Capacity Guides - Photos, MP3s & Data
Storing data on hard disks and DVDs is such an abstract concept. It is difficult to conceive how much 'space' is taken up by a photo, song or a few emails when storing them on a hard drive. That's why we have written this guide to provide you with a more practical way of dealing with the maze of megabytes and gigabytes.
Organising Your Storage Capacity
The most accurate way of figuring out how many songs and photos, etc can be stored on a hard drive or disk is to understand the jargon. It is then simply a case of dividing the space on your storage disk, depending on the amount of room your music, videos, pictures and data takes up.
Factors such as the quality of the photo, video, music, or the amount of formatting in a document will all change the amount of space taken up by the file that is created. Here is our rough guide.
The Basics
1 Megabyte (MB) equates to about:
- 1 minute of music
- 1 low resolution photo
- 12000 words in a Word file (about 20-30 pages)
- 10 seconds of low resolution video
1 Gigabyte (GB) (equals 1000Mb) equates to about:
- 16.6 hours of music (roughly 16 CDs)
- 350 high resolution photos (or 50 'RAW' photos)
- 2-3 full length novels
- 5 minutes of good quality video (13GB per hour)
While the above will give you a very rough idea of the disk space used, the most accurate way will be to find out for yourself. To see exactly how much space one of your files takes up (using Windows), open My Computer, click on My Documents and you will see all your files listed. To the right of the files, will be the file size. The file size will be shown in KB, which stands for KiloBytes. There are 1024KBs in a MegaByte, so get your calculator out!
With a Mac, you can use Finder or Spotlight to display information about the size of a file.
How File Sizes Differ
If you have not brought the equipment you want to use yet, you can usually find the information you require on the manufacturer's website. It is interesting to see how big the various types of files are, for the different products - don't assume anything! Two separate manufacturers may for example sell 5 MegaPixel cameras. One may compress the picture, so the file size will be 2MB. The other may not use such a high compression rate and the file size will be 3.5MB, so it's always best to check.
Video, music, audio recording and photos from different manufacturers will all store data in different ways to suit the individual user and application.