While you might be able to get by on 128GB, it’s probably better to be safe than sorry if you can afford it. On a PC: click the Start button > select 'File Explorer' > select 'This PC.'.On a Mac: click on the Apple logo in the top left corner > select 'About this Mac' > select 'Storage.'.How to check your current laptop's storageįor a better idea of your actual, personal usage, a good place to start is to check how much storage of your current laptop you are using. Apple’s M1 MacBook Air and 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro both start with a base SSD storage of 256GB - twice as much as some previous-generations - and still cost the same. The good news is that most manufactures are increasing the amount of base storage they give laptops without increasing the starting price. With that in mind, we generally recommend upgrading to 256GB to give yourself a little breathing room, though 512 is probably overkill for normal use cases. Using a disk size calculator, and subtracting an extra 20GB for operating system to be on the safe side, you’ll find that “128GB” is more like 99GB, “256GB” is more like 218GB, and “512GB” is more like 456GB.) (According to Lifewire, for each gigabyte that you think your hard drive has, it has about 70.3 megabytes less of disk space. There are two reasons for this:įirst, your laptop's operating system takes up a good chuck of space right out of the box the latest version of macOS, (Monterey) takes up a little more than 12GB, for example, while the latest version of Windows 10 takes up about 15GB.Īnd second, most laptop manufacturers deal in specs that are base-10 numbers instead of the less intuitive base-2 numbers computers actually use, meaning hard drive capacities are always slightly lower than they are rated to be.

One of the most important things to know is that there's a difference between the amount of usable storage space on a laptop and the amount advertised - it's actually much less. But there are some handy rules of thumb and wrinkles to know about. So, how much storage do you really need? There is no perfect answer, of course. How Much Smartphone Storage Do You Really Need?

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