Want to know how many movies can fit on 1 Terabyte of storage space? Off the top of your head, I am pretty sure you know that it is a lot. It is and to help you out, we have a little chart that will highlight the drives storage capacity for the different movie types.
If you got a 1TB hard drive or looking to buy one, you already know that it is a ton of storage space. This is definitely a good drive to have and the amount of movies it can hold is perfect if you are someone who has a large or growing movie collection.
All the information below is based on real world averages. Please be aware that the 1 Terabyte drive can hold more or less, it really depends on many different factors.
Movie Sizes used:
- SD Movie from iTunes = 1.5GB (Average Size)
- 720p Movie from iTunes = 4GB (Average Size)
- 1080p Movie from iTunes = 5GB (Average Size)
- DVD Rip (Pirated) = 700MB (Average Size)*
- Blue Ray Rip 720p (Pirated) = 1GB (Average Size)*
- Blue Ray Rip 1080p (Pirated) = 3.5GB (Average Size)*
Movie Type | Movie Size | 1 TB |
SD Movie from iTunes | 1.5 GB | 666 |
720p Movie from iTunes | 4 GB | 250 |
1080p Movie from iTunes | 5 GB | 200 |
DVD Rip (Pirated) | 700 MB | 1428 |
Blue Ray Rip 720p (Pirated) | 1 GB | 1000 |
Blue Ray Rip 1080p (Pirated) | 3.5 GB | 286 |
As you can see, 1 TB will hold hundreds or thousands of movies, it really depends on the quality and type of movies that you are planning on saving to it.
Whichever way you look at it, the 1 TB drive will deliver and you definitely can’t go wrong with, unless you plan to fill it up pretty quickly, in that case look at the storage capacity of the 2 TB drive.
Office Documents
It is estimated that 85,899,345 pages of Word documents would fill one terabyte. Now, if you can truly generate that much content, you have a serious archiving task on your hands. I am currently reading the book “John Adams” by David McCullough; it is approximately 650 pages long which means I could archive about 132,152 books of similar size. It has taken me nearly two months to read this book so it would take 66,076 months or 5,506 years to read my entire library. I cannot read that fast, nor do I have that much life left in me.
Music Files
Assuming that an average song takes up five megabytes, one terabyte could fit approximately 200,000 songs or 17,000 hours of music. How many songs do you have on your iTunes right now?
Movies
You could fit approximately 500 hours worth of movies on one terabyte. Assuming each movie is roughly 120 minutes long, that would be about 250 movies. I do know people who have that many movies in their library, so it is possible that they could build a database of movies to fill that space.
Pictures
You could fit approximately 310,000 photos in one terabyte. You could fit even more if you used a compression algorithm. How would you even catalog that many photos? By time, by subject, by category? Suddenly, we are facing big data issues in our personal lives, and we are going to need similar tools to be able to make sense of all of our potential data stores. With digital photography, it is possible to take a lot of photos without ever having to worry about development costs, so maybe 300,000 pictures is not out of the question.
Thoughts
With advances in technology, we have a lot of potential storage space available to us. Microsoft struck the opening salvo, but I expect Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, and others to follow suit. One terabyte hard drives are not uncommon right now and even though we have the potential filespace, can we fill it responsibly? If we can fill it, do we have the skills and tools necessary to keep track of our digital belongings? Perhaps there is a new IT job category—personal archivist—created for those individuals drowning in their digital “stuff.” My point is that we need to take a step back and assess the data that we are keeping and ask ourselves: “Just because I can keep it all, do I need to? Do I have the skills and tools necessary to ever find what I am looking for?”
If we don’t need it and we can’t manage it, maybe it is time to clean out the digital garage. Do you need to clean out your digital garage? Let me know your thoughts.
Kelly Brown is an IT professional, adjunct faculty for the University of Oregon, and academic director of the UO Applied Information Management Master’s Degree Program. He writes about IT and business topics that keep him up at night.