how much hard drive space is good for a computer?

Answer 1

Depends on what you'll be storing on it. If you do need extra space, you can always buy an external hard drive to keep data on.

Answer 2

The more the merrier.

Granny

Answer 3

If you have a lot of music, pictures or want to work with video than more will be needed compared to if you mostly just surf, email. 320GB is a good/affordable option. If you are on a network, consider a NAS (Network Attached Storage) setup for backups and shared files.

Answer 4

OK, what type of computer, and what are you going to be doing with it? Is it a laptop or a desktop? Are you going to be downloading and saving a lot of movies or television shows? Are you a photographer or video diva or divo who will be storing a great deal of photos on your computer? Are you a writer and will have books stored on it? Are you a music hound and will have thousands of song files stored on it?

See? It is difficult to tell you what size of hard drive would be best for you without additional information.

With that said, if you plan on doing a bit of all of these, get a 500 Gigabyte hard disk drive, and add internal and then external drives as needed.

Now, if you are purchasing a new computer, or if you are building your own computer, you can ensure that there are extra bays for hard disk drive additions in the future.

I just bought a motherboard for a computer I am building which has six SATA drive connections. I can place six 500 Gigabyte, (or large as they come available) into this computer. I am starting with two, and will add more as needed. I do a lot of video rendering, and photo editing. I also do CAD work, so I need a system with a lot of speed and power.

Everyone has a certain way they intend to use their system. What they buy or build is based on those needs or intentions. If you are not sure if you will be storing a lot of mulitmedia files on your system, but enjoy taking photos and videos, or enjoy downloading movies or tv shows, then start with the expectation of current needs and also plan for the future.

You may not need a huge HDD to begin. But, if you buy a system with only one, and then discover you enjoy creating YouTube or family videos, you would quickly run out of disk space. If you bought a system with only two HDD bays, you would then be required to add external HDD when you ran out of space on both your internal drives. (after you added the second internal drive of course. lol)

If this is a laptop, your choices are more limited. You can get only one HDD in a laptop I believe, but you can add external drives. Laptops are not really meant to serve as the main computer. It is for when you travel, take images, video, photos, ect, or work, and when you get home you sync your files onto your desktop system.

I know many people have only a laptop. There are ways you can configure your setup to allow for a seperate tower of HDDs. Some have towers with up to ten seperate physical HDDs enclosed inside.

However, you do need to note that external HDDs are not as fast as internal HDDs. This is due to the fact that the data must be read through a cable, such as a USB or Firewire cable, not directly off of the HDD installed internally.

So, my best advice to you is to try to figure out what your current needs are, and what you may wish to do in the future, and make your purchases accordenly.

If you buy the new Windows Home Server, you do not need to buy a lot of extra HDDs for your system. Windows Home Server, WHS, allows for quick and simple addition of as many physical HDDs as you would like. I know of some people who were a part of the Test Team, (as was I) who had Terabytes of HDD space! lol That is a bit of over kill for me, but these folks record a great deal of television, download movies from Online stores, take a lot of digital photos, and videos. They then transfer all of this media to WHS, so they do not need a lot of HDD space in their main system.

If you plan to eventually buy WHS for your home network, then only get a 250-300 Gigabyte HDD for your system. If you are not sure if you will buy WHS for your network, then get at least two 500 Gigabyte HDD. You would be amazed at how quickly your disks will fill up if and when you begin to seriously download video and add other multimedia files.

Good luck and much success with your system.

Answer 5

Depends on what you want to do with your computer. If you are going to be using it for anything that requires alot of memory then shoot for something over 100 gig's. I personally use a 120 gig Western Digital and do alot of video graphics with eat up alot of memory and haven't ever came close to filling up my hard drive.

Good thing about the new techonolg is that if you fill up that hard drive you can always upgrade for room with an external hard drive down the road. Those don't require to install any system info. Your current computer will treat it like a plug-and-play object much like an over sized USB Flash Drive. You just pop it in your computers USB drive and you have an extra hard drive that you can take with you where ever.

If you are in the market for some DVD copy software that doesn't require a degree to operate then you have to check this software out. Best thing is that it's free. I wrote a tutorial on how to use it as well. Don't worry everything is free on my site including the software. Here's the site:

http://free-dvd-copy-software.blogspot.com/2007/12/free-dvd-copy-software.html

Answer 6

it depends on what you want to do with the computer. The good news is that hard drives are easy to install and getting much cheaper, so if you find yourself running out of space you can go get another one and be up and running with more space in minutes.
I would say a good baseline to start is 250GB. I consider myself a gamer and do some photo editing, I have 400GB. If you plan on doing video editing or dvd authoring then go with a lot more space so you have room to store clips for editing.
Another consideration is to mix and match drives. Some drives are built for large storage and others are built for speed, by combining two of these drives, for instance a 150GB western digital raptor drive, which has a 10,000rpm speed and a 16MB cache as the drive you install windows on and other programs you use all the time, and then compliment that with a 500GB western digital caviar SE16 drive, with a 7200rpm speed and 16MB cache would make for an excellent storage solution.
I just used western digital for example because they offer the raptor and other drives, I have used maxtor, western digital and seagate with no problems.

Answer 7

If you use it for gaming, around 650 GB is good. If it is for home use than around 200 depending on what files you want to store. If you have a lot of videos than you want around 200.