Just about every month or so — except around the holidays when it’s every week — some PC maker ships a new laptop with a whole bunch of new specs that they try to convince you is absolutely the best one you should buy. The company rattles off a whole list of numbers and magical features (mostly AI-related these days) and hopes you’ll just buy it because it sounds fancy or powerful.
The truth is that the specs rarely, if ever, tell the whole story of a laptop and for most people, those don’t matter as much as they once did — especially the storage.
Depends on what you use 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 do I need in my laptop?” My first response is, “What will you use the laptop for?” Answering this question is a pretty foolproof way to determine how much storage you need on a laptop.
The one exception to this rule would be Chromebooks. Chromebooks are made to operate mostly in the cloud, so the whole point is to keep everything off your laptop. The cheapest Chromebooks come with 64GB, but 128GB would be perfectly fine on a Chromebook. If you play a lot of games or create content with your Chromebook, 256GB is a better choice, but there are some Chromebooks with 512GB or 1TB of storage that will be more than enough.
If, like most people, you plan on using it for email and other basic home office tasks, web browsing and streaming your favorite content, then you really don’t need much storage at all. You could save yourself quite a bit of money by choosing a laptop with 256GB instead of paying more for extra space you won’t use. However, that is the lowest amount I’d recommend. You will find cheaper laptops with just 128GB of storage, but I would stay away from those. With every software update, the amount of room Windows and MacOS take up on your laptop grows, and all the apps and things you use on a regular basis continue to get larger and more complex as well.
Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source on Chrome.
For gamers, developers or creative professionals, i.e., a videographer, photographer, graphic designer, content creator, etc., you’ll absolutely need more than 256GB of storage. On the gaming side, most of the triple-A games today are landing at well over 100GB, so you’d basically only get one game on your hard drive at a time. On the content side, photo and video file sizes are also growing as our cameras get better at capturing more detail, so you’ll also quickly fill up your laptop after just a couple of projects.
For these folks, the minimum I recommend is 1TB of storage. That gives you space to store at least enough games to keep you entertained for a while and enough content to work with until you can offload some. Most creative professionals and many hard-core gamers will try to get the absolute maximum amount of storage you can find in a laptop, which these days is typically 8TB.
The Lenovo Legion 5i Gen 10 gaming laptop comes with a 512GB SSD, but has an open M.2 slot for adding another drive.
One word of caution: Don’t choose a storage capacity with the thought that you’ll just upgrade the drive later. Years ago, outgrowing your internal drive wasn’t too big of an issue; it was fairly easy to copy your storage to a larger drive and insert the new drive into your laptop. Now, many laptops have the storage soldered onto the motherboard, making it difficult, if not impossible, to upgrade. If you buy with the plan to upgrade later, make sure the drive can easily be swapped out first. Gaming laptops still typically have accessible storage drives, for example.
If you have the money, it’s perfectly fine to load up on as much storage in your laptop as you want. If you’re configuring a laptop directly from a manufacturer like Dell, Lenovo or HP, their storage pricing can be all over the place. Because some drives are faster than others, PC makers might offer drives with different speeds and capacities, and yes, faster drives will translate into better performance. If you’re choosing between a larger capacity or a higher-performance drive, you might want to put your money on the latter. Apple, on the other hand, is a little more straightforward. For example, each capacity upgrade for a MacBook Air is a flat $200. In the past, though, Apple has used slightly slower storage in its MacBook Air base models, while increasing capacity also increases drive speed. In other words, that $200 gets you more than just double the storage space.
Everything’s in the cloud
For anyone who doesn’t want to sink more money into storage that might never get used, there are other options. Most of us have added some amount of cloud storage to our computing experience, particularly for photos and videos. I remember growing up, we would fill up our 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 applications these days. Services like iCloud Drive, Google Drive and Dropbox are some of the most convenient services around because as long as there’s a device nearby with access to the internet, I can access all my most important files from anywhere in the world.
Many popular older applications that we think need to be “installed,” like Word, Excel and Photoshop, all have web versions now as well, which you can access simply from a web browser. The number of applications you need to store locally on your laptop is a fraction of what it was even a few years ago. And, of course, all of our entertainment is on the cloud as well. Back in college, I had to buy multiple storage drives just to fit all of my pirated downloaded movies and music, and now I can listen to and watch it all streamed to my phone.
Progress.
All this is to say that, for better or worse, we no longer have to worry about storing everything we could ever want or need on our laptops. It’s all just a few clicks (and a subscription) away.
External storage is quite 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 yearly subscription. External hard drives have become quite affordable over the years, particularly hard drives (though even solid-state drives have dropped in price significantly). For example, a 2TB subscription to Google One Premium is $100 a year, while a 5TB portable hard drive is about $100, or even less on sale.
The Western Digital 14TB Elements can be found on sale for as low as $170. Plenty of space to keep your laptop’s smaller storage drive free of clutter.
Even the much faster and more secure SSDs — the kind inside most laptops — are much cheaper these days. You can find a good 1TB SSD for about $100 as well. Something else to consider: SD or microSD cards. If your laptop has a built-in card slot, you can always pop in a high-capacity card to increase your laptop’s file storage. As with any removable storage, just be careful what you store on it without encrypting and password-protecting the drive, which can be done with BitLocker on Windows or Disk Utility on MacOS.
Don’t overpay
It’s easy to get lost in all the jargon of technical specs and features of a laptop, but with storage, don’t fall for 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 likely know who you are. My recommendation is to save money on the storage and use it to add more RAM. These days, you typically need at least 16GB of RAM in a laptop for it to run smoothly for years to come. And, unlike storage, the majority of laptops now do not have removable memory, so you won’t be able to add more later.
