How many movies can a 500 gb external hard drive hold?

Answer 1

This question is far too general to be answered specifically, but I'll give it a shot! The short answer is... "It depends." The verbose answer is...

It depends primarily on the length and general quality, which directly affects the size, of each movie file you intend to store. For example if you have a 105 minute movie file that is the same resolution and encoded/compressed in the same manner and quality as a DVD movie (MPEG2) then you can count on each file being approximately 2.8GB in size. Using this as a baseline you should be able to store approximately 357 DVD quality movie files on 1TB of storage. However if you have files with a lower resolution (as is often the case in digital cameras and internet videos) or a higher compression ratio (as there is in MPEG4 files) than a standard DVD then you'll be able to fit more files onto the drive, quite possibly many, MANY more. Of course this means that if you have higher quality files, like HD movies, then you won't be able to fit nearly as many on to 1TB of storage.

In summary, the question you should be asking yourself is "What number, type and quality of files to I want to store?" Answering this will tell you whether you need a 16GB thumb-drive, a RAID-0 array of eight 2TB drives (16TB total storage) or, most likely, something inbetween.

I hope this helps, good luck and take care!

Answer 2

if they are 700 mb files, then the hdd in question should hold about 400 movies.if half are 1.4 then it will be about 300movies if they are 1.4 then it will be 200. if they are random sizes and in no particular format then it is anywhere from 45 to 800+....just a thought....