How much storage space do you need in a laptop?

Almost every month — except for the holidays when that’s every week — some PC maker ships a new laptop with a whole bunch of new specs that they’re trying to convince you is the absolute best that you should buy. The company releases a whole list of magical numbers and features (mostly AI-related these days) and hopes you’ll buy them just because they sound fancy or powerful.

The truth is that specs rarely, if ever, tell the whole story of a laptop, and for most people, they don’t matter as much as they once did — especially storage space.

Depends on what you’re using your laptop for

One of the most common questions I get asked as a tech journalist (mostly from my friends and family) is “How much storage space do I need in my laptop?” My first answer is: “What will you use the laptop for?” Answering this question is a pretty foolproof way to determine how much storage space you need on a laptop.

The only exception to this rule is Chromebooks. Chromebooks are designed to run mostly in the cloud, so the main goal is to keep everything away from your laptop. The cheapest Chromebooks come with 64GB, but 128GB will be just fine for a Chromebook. If you play a lot of games or create content with a Chromebook, 256GB is a better option, but there are some Chromebooks with 512GB or 1TB of storage that will be more than enough.

If, like most people, you plan to use it for email and other basic home office tasks, web browsing and streaming your favorite content, you really don’t need much storage space at all. You can save yourself a lot of money by choosing a 256GB laptop instead of paying more for extra space that you won’t use. However, this is the lowest amount I recommend. You will find cheaper laptops with only 128GB of storage, but I would stay away from those. With every software update, the amount of space Windows and MacOS take up on your laptop increases, and all the apps and things you use on a regular basis continue to get larger and more complex, too.

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For gamers, developers or creative professionals, such as videographer, photographer, graphic designer, content creator, etc., you will definitely need more than 256GB of storage space. In terms of games, most of today’s high-quality games are over 100GB in size, so you’ll only get one game on your hard drive at a time. On the content side, image and video file sizes are also increasing as our cameras get better at capturing more detail, so you’ll also be able to quickly fill up your laptop after just a few projects.

For these people, the minimum I recommend is 1TB of storage space. This gives you space to store at least enough games to keep you entertained for a while and enough content to work with so you can unload some. Most creative professionals and many hardcore gamers will try to get the absolute maximum amount of storage space you can find in a laptop, which these days is typically 8TB.

One word of caution: Don’t choose storage thinking you’ll upgrade the drive later. Years ago, increasing the size of your internal drive wasn’t a big deal; He was It’s fairly easy to copy your storage space to a larger drive And insert the new drive into your laptop. Now, many laptops have storage soldered to the motherboard, making it difficult, if not impossible, to upgrade. If you purchase with a plan to upgrade later, make sure the drive can be easily swapped out first. For example, gaming laptops usually still have accessible storage drives.

If you have the money, it’s perfectly fine to load as much storage into your laptop as you want. If you are configuring a laptop directly from the manufacturer such as Dale, Lenovo or HPTheir storage prices can be all over the place. Because some drives are faster than others, computer manufacturers may offer drives with different speeds and capabilities, and yes, faster drives will translate into better performance. If you’re choosing between a larger capacity or a high-performance drive, you may want to put your money on the latter. Apple, on the other hand, is somewhat more straightforward. For example, each MacBook Air capacity upgrade costs $200. However, in the past, Apple has used slightly slower storage in its base MacBook Air models, while increasing capacity also increases the speed of the drive. In other words, $200 gets you more than just double the storage space.

Everything is in the cloud

For anyone who doesn’t want to spend more money on storage space that may never be used, there are other options. Most of us have added some amount of Cloud storage to our computing experience, especially for photos and videos. I remember growing up, we would fill entire desktops and multiple external hard drives with vacation photos and videos (most of which we never looked at again), but thanks to services like iCloud Photos and Google Photos, we no longer have to deal with that. The same goes for files and even apps these days. Services like iCloud Drive, Google Drive, and Dropbox are some of the most convenient because as long as there is a device nearby with an Internet connection, I can access all of my most important files from anywhere in the world.

Many popular legacy applications that we think need to be “installed,” such as Word, Excel, and Photoshop, all now also have web versions, which you can simply access from a web browser. The number of applications that need to be stored locally on your laptop is a fraction of what it was a few years ago. Of course, all of our entertainment is on the cloud too. When I was in college, I had to buy multiple storage drives to fit all my disks Pirated Movies and music I downloaded, and now I can listen to them and watch them streamed on my phone.

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All of this means that, for better or worse, we no longer have to worry about storing everything we want or need on our laptops. It’s all just a few clicks (and a subscription) away.

External storage is very affordable

Even with all these great advances in storage technology, it’s still perfectly reasonable to want some extra storage every now and then — especially if you don’t want to pay for a monthly or annual subscription. External hard drives have become more affordable over the years, especially hard drives (although the prices of solid-state drives have dropped significantly). For example, a 2TB Google One Premium subscription costs $100 per year, while a 5TB portable hard drive subscription costs around $100, or even less on sale.

Even the fastest, most secure SSDs — like the type found in most laptops — are much cheaper these days. You can find a good 1TB SSD for around $100. Another thing to consider: SD or microSD cards. If your laptop has a built-in card slot, you can always insert a high-capacity card to increase your laptop’s file storage space. As with any removable storage, just be careful about what you store on it without encrypting and password-protecting the drive, which can be done using BitLocker on Windows or Disk Utility on MacOS.

Don’t exaggerate

It’s easy to get lost in all the technical jargon of a laptop, but with storage, don’t fall into the trap of paying for more than you need. Most people don’t need more than 256GB in a laptop, and if you do, you probably know who you are. My recommendation is to save money on storage space and use it to add more RAM. These days, you typically need at least 16GB of RAM in a laptop to keep it running smoothly for years to come. Unlike storage, most laptops now don’t have removable memory, so you won’t be able to add more later.