How Much Storage Do I Need On My Laptop?

Did you know you can get some laptops which are just browsing laptops and have no storage space for downloads? It’s true.It would have been unthinkable several years ago, but now that’s the way technology is moving. More and more, people are being encouraged to use cloud storage rather than storing their files directly onto their laptops or PCs.

And this includes big companies too, like Google and Microsoft. Google has Google Drive, complete with spreadsheet and document apps like Google Sheets and Google Docs which are free to use up to 15 GB.

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While Microsoft has One Drive, and Office 365, that allows you to store all kinds of files.

One Drive is free to use up to 5 GB, and Office 365 comes with a subscription fee of about $10 a month (cheaper if you pay yearly) and gives you a whole terabyte of storage space per user.

But We Would Argue That Storing All Your Files On The Cloud Is Not Ideal…

For example, what if you don’t have a particularly good WiFi connection or signal where you live, and you need to check one of your files urgently? Or access a file when you’re out and about and don’t have an internet connection on your smartphone?

Or what if you have some rather risque photos of your partner that you don’t want falling into the wrong hands? You don’t want to risk saving those to the cloud – what if your account got hacked?

You can solve such issues by investing in a laptop that has all the on-board storage you could need. But the big question is how much storage space do you actually need on your laptop?

(Feel free to scroll ahead.)

If you haven’t looked into it by now, we’d forgive you for feeling clueless. It’s quite a tricky thing to try to figure out. Sure short text-based emails used to only take up a few kilobytes of memory, but these days some laptop manufacturers are making laptops with 1 terabyte of memory or more.

For those who don’t already know:

• One megabyte (1 MB) is 1000 kilobytes (1000 kb)
• One gigabyte (1 GB) is 1000 megabytes (1000 MB)
• One terabyte (1 TB) is 1000 gigabytes (1000 GB)

And just to make things more complicated, all files of a particular type or format are definitely not always the same size, and they can in fact vary quite considerably in size, especially if they have been heavily edited.

But that bit of info doesn’t really give you very much to go on, which is why we’ve put together some handy guidelines for you. This should help give you a good starting point in working out how much storage space to look for in your next laptop.

How Much Storage Space Do I Need For 100 Movies?

Movies exist in several different formats and with different levels of quality. But these are undoubtedly the largest type of file you can store on your laptop. 

(In most countries it is illegal to download movies from torrent sites because of copyright issues. We don’t encourage it. People who do download movies this way tend to use a VPN to cover their tracks.)

The average movie takes up around 1.5 GB of storage space, so if you wanted room for 100 movies, you will need at least 150 GB of space.

How Much Storage Space Do I Need For 100 Songs?

If you have a lot of CDs that you still love to listen to, you can easily store the music directly onto your laptop using a simple app, and then perhaps you can sell your CDs on or donate them to a charity shop.

How much space your songs will take depends on the level of audio quality. If you want to save 100 songs that have an audio quality of 128 kbps, then you would need 268 MB, but for an audio quality of 192 kbps, you would need 403.2 MB of space.

How Much Storage Space Do I Need For 100 Quality Photos?

Again with photos, file size does depend on the photo quality. High quality photographic images tend to take up 2 MB of space, which means that for 100 photos, you will need approximately 200 MB of storage space.

How Much Storage Space Do I Need For 100 Hours Of Audiobooks Or Podcasts?

As with music files, audiobooks can also vary quite considerably in size depending on the audio quality, and on the length of the track.

Each hour of Audible audiobook requires approximately 30 MB of space when you download it in high quality. So for 100 hours worth, you will need 3,000 MB or 3 GB of storage space.

How Much Storage Space Do I Need For 100 Ebooks?

Ebooks can also vary quite considerably in file size, with comic books taking up much more space than standard text only ebooks. 

But standard PDFs tend to be around the 100 MB mark, so taking that figure as our standard, 100 ebooks would require 10,000 MB, or 1 GB of storage space.

How Much Storage Space Do I Need For 10 PC Games?

The amount of storage space you need for PC games depends on just how graphic intensive they are.

However, we can report that AAA games require at least 100 GB of storage space per game. In which case, 10 such games would require 1,000 GB, or 1 TB of storage space.

Bottom Line

So, ultimately, how much storage space you need on your laptop depends entirely on how you intend to use it…

If you’re going to be downloading lots of movies, or playing lots of graphic intensive PC games then you should go for a laptop with at least 1 TB of storage space. 

If you are going to do a lot of heavy photo editing or DJ-ing, we would recommend a laptop with at least 500 GB of storage space.

And if you’re only interested in ebooks and audiobooks, you’d be better off saving them directly on your device than on your laptop.