Lesson 6 of 6
Estimate Like an Engineer: The Storage Planning Project
Put it all together: plan real storage for a school, a game studio and an AI startup using back-of-envelope maths.
Learn it
Engineers estimate storage with a simple formula: number of things × size of each thing × safety factor.
The safety factor (usually 1.5–2×) covers growth, backups, and the fact that you never want a drive 100% full.
Example — school photo archive: 1,000 students × 20 photos/year × 3 MB × 5 years ≈ 300 GB → plan for 600 GB with safety factor.
Always ask: does it need to be fast (SSD) or just big (hard drive/archive)? Speed costs 5–10× more per GB.
Try it
A video club films 2 hours of 4K video per week (≈ 50 GB/hour). How much storage do they need for one school year (40 weeks), including a 2× safety factor?
pythonhours_per_week = 2
gb_per_hour = 50
weeks = 40
safety = 2
total_gb = hours_per_week * gb_per_hour * weeks * safety
print(total_gb / 1000, "TB")Challenge
Final project — AI startup storage plan: a startup stores 50,000 user photos/day (3 MB each), keeps 30 days online ('hot'), and archives everything forever ('cold'). They also host a 7B quantised AI model (4 GB) per GPU across 10 GPUs. Estimate: hot storage needed, cold archive growth per year, and total model memory. Recommend a storage setup.
Pick whichever way suits you — every mode earns the same bonus XP.
Write at least 40 more characters to submit.
Mark your own work
Guided walkthrough — 0/3 clues revealed
- Clue 1 locked — reveal it only if you get stuck.
- Clue 2 locked — reveal it only if you get stuck.
- Clue 3 locked — reveal it only if you get stuck.
Each clue costs 4 XP (never below 20 XP). You'd earn 40 XP right now.