IBM invented the hard drive in 1953 and started selling them in 1956. The first commercially-available drive stored 5 MB of data, at a cost of $10,000 per megabyte, and filled an entire room.

Today, you can buy a 16 TB (terabyte) hard drive for $420 that’s roughly the same size as a deck of cards. That’s 3.2 million times the capacity for less than 1 percent of the price.

And the smaller size makes today’s ultraportable laptops possible.

You might be wondering, “How much storage do I need on my laptop?” Let’s take a look at the answer to that question.

Storage Capacity vs RAM

When you’re looking at laptops, you’ll see two types of memory:

  • RAM
  • Storage

RAM, or random access memory, is what the computer uses to run applications, process data, and store anything it’s actively working on.

Storage is where your operating system, applications, data, pictures, and other information gets saved. Storage capacity is usually much higher than the RAM because most users gather a lot of data over time.

If you navigate here you can see the range of options available.

Things to Be Aware of When Comparing Laptops

When you’re looking at the storage capacity of different laptops, there are a couple of things you should keep in mind.

First, there can be a difference between the advertised storage and the actual storage you see when you check the details on your laptop.

Computers operate on a base-2 counting system so one gigabyte of data is actually 1,024 megabytes. Many manufacturers report the storage capacity as a multiple of 1,000 though, not 1,024.

If you have 100GB of storage, the actual amount is 102,400 megabytes (100 x 1,024). Dividing that by 1,000 rounds off to 102 so the manufacturer might list that as 102GB.

Second, your new laptop comes with pre-installed software that uses some of the space. The operating system (Windows or macOS) can use anywhere from 8 to 15GB of space and any other apps that come pre-installed also use some.

When you first power up your new laptop, you’ll have less than the total space available to you.

Comparing the Different Measurements

When you look at different laptop configurations, you’ll see two measurements for the storage capacity:

  • GB (gigabytes)
  • TB (terabyte)

One TB is 1,024 GB so if you compare a laptop with 1 TB of storage against another with 256 GB, for example, the larger one holds four times as much data.

HDD vs SSD Storage

There are two types of internal storage drives on laptops — hard disk drives (HDD) and solid-state drives (SSD).

Hard drives use a spinning platter with a read/write head that moves across it to access your data. It operates similarly to a record player.

Solid-state drives have no moving parts. Instead, they use memory chips that are more similar to RAM to store information.

Each type of drive has its pros and cons.

Hard drives come in much larger capacities and cost less per megabyte than SSD drives. Their biggest disadvantage is their speed — they’re much slower at reading and writing data than an SSD.

The biggest advantage of an SSD is speed. An SSD-based laptop typically starts up in 10 to 20 seconds while an HDD-based laptop could take 2 or 3 minutes. The downsides to an SSD are a higher cost per megabyte and a smaller maximum capacity.

Both of those things are rapidly changing though. Costs are coming down as capacities increase.

What Do You Use Your Laptop For?

The key factor in figuring out your laptop storage needs is how you use it. Some use cases need more storage than others.

For example, the best laptop for photo storage is probably overkill for general-purpose home use. But an entry-level laptop with minimal storage space will quickly fill up if you save a lot of pictures.

Web Browsing and Other Basic Functions

If you mostly use your laptop for things like browsing the web, checking email, online shopping, and listening to streaming music, you don’t need a lot of storage space. Even the most basic laptop likely has more than enough storage to get by.

Office Applications

Running business applications like Microsoft Office or Google Docs needs more storage, but not significantly more. The applications themselves take up quite a bit of space and some types of documents can be fairly large.

For example, a PowerPoint presentation with lots of images, video, or audio attachments can take up a reasonable amount of space. But the average word processing document or spreadsheet has minimal space requirements.

Gaming

Gaming is one of the applications that need more storage. Modern 3D games can use upwards of 100GB for a single game. The 3D textures that make the graphics look so good take up a lot of space. And the bigger the in-game world gets, the more space it needs.

Photo and Video Editing

If you store a lot of photos or videos on your laptop, you’ll need as much storage as possible. Modern smartphones and digital cameras take high-resolution pictures and video that needs a lot of space. Video is particularly storage-hungry, especially if you shoot at 4K resolutions.

Secondary Storage Options

The internal storage on your laptop isn’t your only option, mind you. There are a couple of options for offloading data from your laptop to free up space internally.

This isn’t necessarily a good option for active files that you’re working with regularly. But if you have older files that you want to keep but don’t access very often, archiving them to another storage device makes sense.

External Drives

The first option for offloading data from your laptop is to use an external drive of some kind. This could be a USB memory stick, an external hard drive, or even a DVD-ROM if you want to go slightly older-school.

These devices vary in size but in all their cases, you need to carry them around with you if you want to be able to access the files on them. They work best when you have your laptop docked at your desk, where you don’t need to worry so much about the amount of weight or space.

Cloud Storage

Cloud storage is another option for offloading files from your laptop’s internal storage. Services like Dropbox and Google Drive let you store your files in the “cloud” which means they’re stored on a server you access over the internet.

This option saves you from having to carry around extra devices when you’re on the go but you need an internet connection to access your data. And depending on the types of files you’re accessing, it can be pretty slow on public wireless networks.

Common Laptop Storage Sizes

There are several common sizes that you’ll see when comparing laptops.

For HDD-based models, they typically start at 1 TB and go up from there. At the higher-end, you’ll see as much as 8 TB in laptop configurations.

SSD-based laptops generally start at 128 GB and go as high as 4 TB. In today’s market, SSD prices jump significantly when you get past 1 TB but that won’t take long to change. As larger capacities get released, the lower ones drop in price.

Don’t Cut Corners On Storage

Most modern laptops have limited upgradability. They’re designed to be as thin and light as possible and a side-effect of that design is that they’re harder to open up to change components.

SSD-based laptops are especially hard to upgrade because the storage is usually soldered directly onto the laptop’s motherboard. You need to buy a laptop with enough storage built-in because you probably won’t be able to add more in the future.

Don’t spend more than you can afford but if you’re on the fence about spending a little more to get more storage, it’s almost always better to invest the extra money. A year or two down the road, you’ll probably thank your past self for that decision.

How Much Storage Do I Need On My Laptop?

So at the end of the day, what’s the answer to the question “How much storage do I need on my laptop?”

The answer is, it depends on your budget and how you use your computer. But in today’s environment, we don’t recommend anything less than 256 GB and even that’s on the low side. If you can afford to bump it to 512 GB or even 1 TB for an SSD model or 4 TB or more for an HDD laptop, you’ll have plenty to work with.

We cover many other tech-related topics on our blog so be sure to check out the rest of our site for more helpful tips and tricks.