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.
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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. Matt Elliott/CNET
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