How Much Storage Do You Actually Need?

Sourced from real discussions on r/DataHoarder and r/buildapc, cross-checked against live PricePerGig listings.

For the average user, 500GB for a laptop is sufficient; if you also install a few games, stretch to 1TB. For a gaming PC with a handful of high quality games, then 2TB is your minimum; you’ll forever be doing the uninstall/reinstall shuffle otherwise. If you’ve photos to back up and just want a ‘desktop based phone’, go check your current phone size, and add 500GB (half an extra TB).

If you’re asking how much storage you need for the future, I always start at the same 2 questions: how much storage do you have now? And how many times in the last 6 months have you been frustrated by the lack of storage? My simple equation is you need what you have now, plus 500GB (half a TB), plus 250GB (a quarter of a TB) for each unique reason you were frustrated. So, if you’ve got 1TB now, and tried to install a game last month, and download some files this month, and both of those were problematic (having to sift through your folders to free up space, uninstall an old game etc.), that equates to 1 + 0.5 + 0.25 + 0.25; 2TB. You need a 2TB drive.

The table above shows live price per TB on your marketplace, because the smart move is to buy big once rather than small twice.

A rough guide by what you do

Let me give you real numbers to anchor on, not vague waffle.

• Everyday laptop, browsing and documents: 500GB to 1TB is plenty.
• Gaming PC: 2TB is the comfortable sweet spot, more if you keep a big library installed.
• Photos and personal files hoard: 4TB to 8TB covers most people for years.
• Serious media library or full backups: 20TB and up, and it will still fill.

Find your row, then add a chunk on top. You will use it.

Why you should buy bigger than today’s need

This is the bit that saves you money long term.

A drive that is bang on your current size today is full and annoying within a year.

Buying one size up costs surprisingly little extra, because bigger drives have a better price per TB. Meanwhile, upgrading later means buying a whole new drive and shuffling data around.

Headroom is cheaper than a do over. Glance at the live table and you will see the bigger capacity is barely more per terabyte.

One big drive or several small ones?

Short version: one big drive wins on value almost every time.

The fixed costs of a drive, the motor, the casing, the controller, get spread across more storage on a big drive. So the price per TB drops as capacity climbs.

The only reason to spread across several drives is redundancy, not value. And redundancy is about protecting data, not saving money.

So buy big for value, then add a second drive for safety if the data matters.

Do not forget the backup tax

Here is the number people forget to budget for.

If your data matters, you need more than one copy. That means your real storage need is roughly double the raw amount, because a backup is a second copy.

Want 8TB of irreplaceable files? Budget for 16TB of drives so you can keep a backup.

It feels like a lot until the day a drive dies and you are very glad you did.

The bottom line

How much storage you need comes down to your use case plus headroom plus a backup copy.

Pick the rough figure for what you do, round up because usage grows, buy big for the best price per TB using the live table above, and double it if the data is irreplaceable. Do that and you buy the right amount once, instead of upgrading again and again and wasting money each time.

When choosing how much space you need to buy, follow my simple equation and, for the vast majority of people, you’ll be golden. And remember, you can save some cash now, but doing the whole data shuffle buying a new drive later is also about a day’s work; how much is that worth to you? Check out all the drives on PricePerGig to find the best value.

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