Types of Storage
Solid State Drives vs. Hard Disk Drives
SSDs offer faster performance, better durability, lower power consumption, and quieter operation compared to HDDs, but at a higher cost per gigabyte. HDDs, on the other hand, provide larger storage capacities at a lower cost but are slower and more susceptible to physical damage. The choice between SSDs and HDDs often depends on factors such as budget, performance requirements, and storage needs.
Storage Size Terminology
Megabyte vs Gigabyte vs Terabyte. What do they mean?
Megabyte (MB), Gigabyte (GB), and Terabyte (TB) are units of digital information storage capacity. 1 Megabyte is equal to 1,000,000 bytes or 1,024 kilobytes (KB). It is commonly used to measure the size of files, documents, images, and small applications. 1 Gigabyte is equal to 1,024 megabytes and is used to measure larger amounts of data such as videos, music collections, large applications, and operating systems. 1 Teragyte is equal to 1,024 gigabytes. It is used to measure very large amounts of data such as high-definition video, databases, server or computer storage, and backups.
File Sizes. What do I need?
How much storage is needed?
It will depend on what you expect to store, just as mentioned at the beginning of this website! Now that we have a basic understanding of what storage is, and how the terminology translates, lets look at average file sizes.
Documents range from a few kilobytes to just a few megabytes, depending on the content. Photos range from 1-10 megabytes, depending on resolution. Videos of 1-5 minutes in high definition can range from 200MB to 2GB, while full-length movies can get up to 20GB. Applications and games can range from a few gigabytes to over 100GB. So you'll want to have plenty of room to store everything!
