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How Much Storage Do I Need On My Laptop

A frequent question is very common.
Do I Need More Than 1TB In My Laptop, is 512 GB enough storage for the university laptop?
Is 2 TB on a laptop overkill?
How do I increase the storage on my MacBook?
Questions like these are far too common.

This article will answer all such queries and help you choose the right storage capacity for your laptop.

For a normal and average everyday user, 512 GB – 1 TB is the sweet amount. Of course, there are scenarios where it’s not just better, but necessary to go higher or lower than this range.

Before You Begin
It’s crucial and very important to account for OS Space, especially on systems with low overall storage.
Microsoft and Apple both recommend allotting around 64GBs of storage space for the operating system, Any less may lead to performance issues.

Number two you need to keep in mind is the matter of advertised vs. actual disk space.
For instance, an SSD advertised as 512 GB is only 480 GB in size, this discrepancy is even greater in higher storage capacity media.

We highly recommend keeping these things in mind when deciding on the right storage capacity for your laptop.

How to Add Storage to Laptop?

With your laptop, you can easily increase the storage if you have a free slot to install an internal hard drive HDD or SSD, Unfortunately, this isn’t possible in most modern laptops due to physical space constraints.

With modern laptops, likely you need to replace the current storage media with an upgraded one and migrate all the data there, If you’d rather not go through that hassle, an external HDD or SDD is also an excellent option.

You can ditch the physical options entirely and go for Cloud-Based storage.
Some reputable service providers in the 1 – 10 TB range include IDrive, pCloud, Backblaze, IceDrive, and NordLocker.

How Much Storage Do I Need More Than 1TB On My Laptop For University / Gaming / Video Editing?

For most if not all university goers, a laptop that’s good for writing will be the best choice, with around 512 GBs of storage space.
For engineering students specifically, you should bump that number up to 1 TB.

And if you are a gaming and video editing person, as your game library or video projects grow in number, 512 GB will fill up in no time.
For these purposes, we recommend having 1 – 2 TBs of storage space on your laptop.

Do I Need More Than 1TB In My Laptop?

If You Have an 8 GB RAM, Is It Enough For Laptops?

Do I Need More Than 1TB In My Laptop?

Discussing how much RAM your laptop needs, depends on what you use the laptop for.
For casual usage such as writing/blogging and browsing the internet, 8 GB is plenty and good enough.
Heck, you’d probably do fine even with 4 GBs for very light usage.

And for more resource-intensive tasks such as gaming, video editing, or programming, you’ll want 16 – 32 GBs.

Storage Requirement by Usage

We did some good digging and we have divided the space recommendations into light, medium, and heavy sections.

This should help you make the best decision according to your usage intensity, needs, and requirements.

Do I Need More Than 1TB In My Laptop?

Light Usage

Most if not all Casual Users use laptops for school/office work, surfing the web, storing some photos, videos, and the occasional game or two.
For these purposes, an entry-level laptop with 256 GB – 512 GB of storage space will more than suffice.

Different types of Work-related Applications such as MS Office suite, Zoom, Photoshop, etc., only occupy a few GBs at most, the same goes for internet browsers and most general-purpose software.

And when it comes to Storing Photos, image size usually ranges from 400 KB – 8 MB, assuming an average image’s size is 6 MB, 1000 photographs would occupy roughly 6 GBs of space.

Let’s talk about Videos and their spaces, so on average an hour-long HD (720p) video will occupy around 900 MBs, for practical purposes, let’s say you’re storing personal videos, movies, and series that add up to 50 hours total – that would be roughly 45 GBs.

But let’s be honest, most people don’t locally store that many videos anymore, Cloud-based services like Netflix are all the rage these days, so videos taking up too much space likely won’t be a concern for most users.

Video games, games require huge storage capacity and regularly make headlines these days with insane sizes of over 100 GBs, the average game only comes out to around 8-10 GBs, especially if you consider older games as well, in any case, a laptop with 512 GB storage will be plenty for casual gamers.

Medium Usage

Medium users require higher-end laptops capable of handling resource-intensive tasks. In addition to powerful processors and GPUs, it’s also important that these laptops have
1 TB – 2 TB of storage space.

For a computer science or engineering student, you’ll likely need to install several virtual machines and test a lot of applications. For these purposes, 512 GB will usually be enough,
if you plan to store photos, videos, games, and stuff as well, 1 TB storage might be a better option but not the best one.

The graphic designers, video editors, and content creators, the same applies here.
RAW photo is usually 10-50 MB in size, and a 1080P 60FPS video sizes up to 1GB per minute.

You’ll rack up a large number of such projects, which will add up to hundreds, if not thousands of GBs. So, 1 TB and maybe more up to 2 TB is necessary for professional photographers and videographers.

Heavy Usage

Do I Need More Than 1TB In My Laptop?

Some games require a really huge space for example the game
(ARK: Survival Evolved, with all the expansions included, can take up almost 300 GBs) Yes, that’s a massive amount of space for just one game!

Meanwhile, this game (ARK) may be an extreme example, modern games in general (Elden Ring – 60 GB, Valorant – 20GB) tend to be on the heavier side.

A Full HD movie usually ranges from 3 – 6 GBs, whereas a commercial Blu-Ray is between 15 – 25 GBs.

The truth of collecting any sort of media and storing it locally requires quite a lot of storage space, we recommend 2 – 4 TBs if you plan to download a lot of games, movies, and media in general.In a nutshell and to sum it up, most users will need at least 256 GB of storage space. On the other end of the spectrum, some users will require up to 2 – 4 TB of storage space, the right amount for you will depend on your usage habits, needs, and requirements.

Why Is My HDD / SSD Space Less Than Advertised and How Much Storage Do I Need On My MacBook?

(1 GB = 1000 MB = 1,000,000 KB and so on), but this isn’t accurate, you can add some numbers to it.

And the computers use the binary system, the correct values are
1 GB = 1024 MB = 1,048,576 KB and so on. So, in reality, 512 GB is not exactly 512 billion bytes, but rather 480,418,579,101 bytes i.e., 480 GBs, this is where the discrepancy comes from.

In some cases, you really could be getting less storage space than you’re supposed to if some of the storage space is not in use, to resolve this, you can allocate the unused space via Disk Management.

How Much Storage Do I Need On My MacBook?

MacBooks are shipped with three levels of storage capacity – 256 GB, 512 GB, or 1 TB – further upgradeable at purchase, and aimed at casual, average, and power users, respectively.The amount of storage you need on your MacBook will depend on your usage habits and where you fall on this spectrum. We’ve detailed light, medium, and heavy usage in the article above.

Conclusion

At the end of this article, you can get the idea of storage and its needs and the concept of the storage and your needs of it.

And you should what type of people you are:

If you are a gamer or an editor or programmer and it depends on your preference you can choose between the right storage space you need.