Visual Guide: Hard drive storage

The next time you find youself computer shopping, you might be surprised to see what a difference in price a hard drive can make. If you've got a vast music collection that needs a home (or a huge collection of photos or videos), you'll need to be sure your new machine will make a good home (assuming you won't be zapping all of your media to the cloud).

Of course, this is also a pressing consideration when buying an external hard drive, if you'd prefer to go that route — and if you've got enough data, you might very well want to. While tablets also use these kind of storage measurements, they generally don't offer much storage, topping off at about 64GB. Phones and MP3 players boast even less.

It can be extremely difficult to visualize just how much storage space you need. If you overshoot it, you'll pay extra for hard drive space that will sit vacant; if you underestimate, you'll regret your purchase in no time. Check out our visual guide to storage sizes below, where we break down just how many music, video, and photo files some common hard drive storage sizes can hold.

Please note: These figures are estimates! Please be aware that all of the above figures are estimates based on average file sizes, which can be affected by a number of factors. Here are the figures we used to arrive at the numbers above:

• Number of songs Based on a 4MB song lasting 3 minutes and 30 seconds, encoded in 128Kbps MP3 format
• Number of pictures Based on a 2MB average-sized .jpg image from a 7-megapixel digital camera
• Hours of video Based on a roughly 5GB video file at 720p resolution, encoded in H.264 format

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