500 GB For students
Students nowadays are conducting all of their studies online, especially after the pandemic and for that they need a computer to do it. A computer simplifies the process of note-taking, distributing study materials and if you study a programming course, a computer is mandatory. Now the question naturally arises, how much storage is enough for students? As storage increases, the price of the system increases and many students may have the need to get a system as cheaply as possible.
So in this article we are going to explain that 500 GB is actually more than enough for students and how feasible it is to use an inexpensive system with less storage for your school or college. We are going to refer to experiences of using a laptop, a Chromebook and an iPad.
Reasons for student:-
- Notes:- Students need to note everything they study in class and those notes are now taken digitally. There are many note taking applications like OneNote and thankfully they don’t take much storage as they mostly use plain-text or vector pen notes if you’re using an iPad and softwares like GoodNotes. If you attach images like whiteboards, diagrams etc. the size can actually increase but not a lot if you compress them.
- Books:- Nowadays, students and teachers use PDF textbooks to study. The sizes of those books depend on the contents. Medical textbooks with lots of color images can range from 15-50 MB. So it’ll take more than 1000 books to fill up 500 GB of storage.
- Others:- Students need to de-stress themselves from all the studying they do. For example, movies, games, music and other softwares. Video games are very popular among students and PC games are getting bigger in size. For example, Call of Duty: Warzone is over 100 GB in size, Red Dead Redemption is also a whopping 90 GB. Also movies in crisp 1080p or 4K quality are getting more popular which are over 5-10 GBs in size. So hoarding movies and games can put a toll on your storage.
So as you can see, 500 GB is more than enough for students if they try to keep themselves away from hoarding movies and games on their system. If you’re not doing that, you can get away with a lot less than 500 GB.
Few Ways To Get More Storage
Let’s talk about a few ways you can get more storage or curb the problem of having low storage,
Use an external storage option:- Nowadays you can buy external hard discs, pen drives from Sandisk or Seagate to extend your storage more than what you have internally on your system. Hard drives come at a cheap price and pen drives too. But if you want a quick option, you might have to get a SSD which is too expensive.
Delete files you don’t need:- We all have leftover games, movies in our systems we don’t need anymore. Instead of letting them rot in your system, take the initiative to delete them for your system making space for newer ones.
Use a cloud software option:- There are many SaaS(software-as-a-service) online that circumvent the need for internal storage. For example, Google Docs is a popular option to use instead of an offline word processor. There is also Notion, a brand new note-taking software which is gaining popularity among students and influencers. Other examples include Google Sheets(an Excel alternative), Zoom(cloud based conferencing software) and Google Meet. You can also use Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime for all your movie watching needs and Xbox Game Pass Streaming to play video games. Many programming courses now use a cloud based platform to deploy code like in ML or use replit.io to program in C, C++, Python.
Use cloud storage:- Along with SaaS, you can also use cloud storage services like Dropbox and Google Drive to backup your files online and share them among your friends. These options come with free storage but you can expand them with a paid subscription.
Have a separate system for entertainment:- This option might be unfeasible but you can get a separate streaming box or a game console which also come with streaming apps now.
Conclusion
Now that we have explored different ways to get the most out of your 500 GB storage or even way less of it for students. If you’re a student and you want a cheap laptop, you can go for a Chromebook or an iPad, the budget option to be exact. Chromebooks are pretty lightweight in terms of software and most of your softwares is going to be SaaS. The iPad can be a better option if you pair it with a keyboard cover and the Apple Pencil to take notes like pen-and-paper albeit a bit expensive. These options are viable as long as you don’t need Windows as your operating system which you should avoid if you want to get most out of your storage.
