\nMy father bought a PC back in ’91 with a hard disk of 40 MB (megabytes). Although far from the top of the line, it was a marvel.<\/p>\n
\nToday, a middle-of-the-road computer might come with 256 to 1TB of solid state drive storage; some also have a hard disk drive, typically at least 1 TB (1TB = 1000 GB, where GB = gigabyte. Btw: 1GB = 1000 MB).<\/p>\n
From a student’s point of view, storage needs might be implied by the size of documents on disk. An old programmer like me, creating plain text documents, might expect a few KB (1000 KB = 1 MB). Just for the sake of argument, let’s say each plain text document is 3KB per page (they can be much less).<\/p>\n
\nIn the programming courses I’ve taken, it was rare to produce a program more than 7 pages of plain text (in fact most were less than 4 pages). Within such a page are lots of spaces, blank lines, etc, for readability. Anyway, a 7-page program, in plain text with the assumptions above, would be 21KB. A big assignment might involve four of those – let’s say six. You’re up to about 126KB: 12.6% of 1MB. That’s assuming no IDE or automation.<\/p>\n
\nOn the other hand, when you involve an IDE, that same assignment can balloon to 1GB or more – a factor of almost eight thousand. For an upper-level student, that would be a very large computer science project; in my experience, you wouldn’t produce more than one of those per course. <\/p>\n
\nSo let’s say this comp-sci student is in five courses, and they do one of those projects for each course. (Such is an overestimation, in my experience; some comp-sci courses don’t use IDEs, and some demand essay-style assignments, which are much smaller on disc.) However, let’s even double it: 5 courses, two 1GB assignments in each. With backups, etc, each course might demand as much as 10GB, for a total of 50GB that semester.<\/p>\n
\nMicrosoft itself says Windows 11 needs a 64GB drive, which brings us to about 114GB. Moreover, an 808-page textbook, with photos, etc, occupies 48MB on this hard drive: all the student’s textbooks, stored on disk, will likely fit in 0.5GB.<\/p>\n
\nFor the case of the humanities student, mainly producing essays, I just looked over some history ones I submitted in Word format: each is around 20KB on disk. You could write 50 of them and they’d fit in 1MB.<\/p>\n
\nThen the student has a life, of course. A picture, stored on disk, will commonly be 500KB to 5MB. At 5MB, 200 photos will fit in 1GB. A movie might be a one to a few gigabytes, depending on its definition. A game, however, can be a different story: 50GB for one game is modest, while 250GB is possible. Therefore, if the student is a gamer as well, any amount of storage might be needed.<\/p>\n\n
\nStudents often have access to online storage for their assignments, perhaps in the form of an Office 365 student subscription. Looking at my current one, it includes 1TB of online storage. I can’t imagine, as a student, needing 1TB; perhaps a digital arts or media student might use that much, though I don’t see how.<\/p>\n \n
Yesterday, just to be safe, I bought a 64GB thumb drive for $10. Such a drive can accommodate around 1000 of the 808-page textbooks I mentioned above, along with another 50 000 history essays, five of those 1GB comp sci assignments, 200 photos, and one or more HD movies. However, it can’t accommodate even the smallest game of the top-19 biggest PC games list here<\/a>.<\/p>\n \nInteresting, eh?<\/p>\n \nfilecatalyst.com<\/a><\/p>\n microsoft.com<\/a><\/p>\nJack of Oracle Tutoring by Jack and Diane,<\/a> Campbell River, BC.\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Self-tutoring about student computing: the tutor looks into storage needs. My father bought a PC back in ’91 with a hard disk of 40 MB (megabytes). Although far from the top of the line, it was a marvel. Today, a …<\/p>\n