If I use a 6mp digital camera.....?

it's a high res jobbie designed for underwater use, ( the Fuji fine pix F30 )how many pics can I expect to be able to put onto a 500Gb external hard drive?

I know my q got repeated....Sorry....but a genuine, sensible answer would be appreciated.

there is no real answer, depends on the detail in the images as to the size they are. The answer is thousands. Why not fill up a 1gb card then times the number of images by 500........................

a

It depends on the file size, but in all likelihood, it would be in the hundreds of thousands.

Since most cameras store their images in compressed format and you get a choice of the resolution of the images, the answer will vary widely. I shoot pictures in XGA (1024x768) and they fill the computer screen, so I edit them down for sending to people. Unedited they are 150-200k bytes depending on detail in the picture.
Exceptions are RAW and TIFF, which keep the pictures in uncompressed format and take a lot more space.
Up to 18Mb, which will chew through a Gig pretty quickly.
As it says here
http://www.scantips.com/basics9j.html
"For ordinary color images (24 bit RGB), the uncompressed image size when opened in memory is always 3 bytes per pixel. For example, an image size of 3000x2000 pixels is 6 megapixels, and therefore by definition, when uncompressed (when opened), this memory size is 3X that in bytes, or 18 MB."
edit
here
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/fujifilm...
it says the camera only does JPEG for storage.