OK, so now what you need to back up all this data, your mp3 and digital music files, your digital photos, brings us to gadget number 3, which is a portable hard drive. Many students can get by with a portable hard drive that will hold between 80 - 100 gigabytes of storage. That's typically plenty of storage to hold typical text and word files and term papers and things like that.
If you have a student who does digital art or works with digital video files they're going to accumulate much larger files. So you might want to look at hard drives that will hold between 200 and 500 gigabytes worth of storage. For under $200 you can get a portable hard drive that's about 500 gigabytes. That's plenty of storage to cover most of your storage needs. That could actually back up an entire laptop.
One thing to look for in portable hard drives is that they usually come in two flavors - USB2.0 or Firewire and that's just your basic connection between the hard drive and your computer. Now PCs typically use the USB 2.0 connection and some also have a Firewire connection. Apple computers typically have both - USB 2.0 and a Firewire connection. If you have a choice I like to go with the Firewire connection. I find a slightly faster transfer speed reading and writing between the portable hard drive and the computer.
So that brings us to the end of our three gadgets for the college student. We have the mp3 player or iPod, the digital camera, and the portable hard drive to help back up all the data that they collect while they're on their journey to knowledge. That's if for now. Join us again next time. I'm Tim Silva for About.com.