500GB external hard drive enough for film student?

Is a 500GB external hard drive enough for a film student? Im starting University soon to study Film production, just wanted to know your opinions if 500gb is big enough? I have a Canon 550d t2i and plan on storing all my footage for my current films and future films on my hard drive. Apart from that I plan on having some music and photos on the harddrive too, but its the videos that will take up most space. What do u guys think?
 
What I would do is have several large storage drives and a work drive. The storage drive(s) would be quite large; a couple of four TB drives will be filled up much faster than you can imagine. The storage drive(s) can be USB, but back-ups and access times are slow. For the work drive I would definitely use firewire.

I personally use two firewire drives for each project, one as a work drive and one as the archive/back-up drive. My personal preference is Glyph drives; the only brand that (so far) has not crashed on me. I do use USB drives for long-term archival storage.
 
I use 500g drives, but a LOT of them. If one drive fails, and it's backup also fails, I've only lost a portion of my body of work. I usually figure 3 shorts tops per drive, sometimes only two.
 
For T2i Footage, that's plenty of space, depending on your shooting ratios. A 16GB SD card will hold aprox. 45 min on the T2i, so a 500GB would hold about 23 hours of footage. As for brands, I like the LaCie Rugged USB 3.0 drives. I have the 1TB models and couldn't be happier.
 
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