Technology is developing faster than ever with the passage of time, Millions of data are produced every day, and storage devices that were once considered huge are now becoming less and less sufficient to carry our data. To compensate for this massive amount of ever-growing data, scientists and engineers work day and night to make bigger and better storage devices. however, storage isn’t cheap, and the higher the size of a storage device, the bigger the price tag it has.
Considering this if you are an individual that bought a laptop ages ago and wants to expand on memory or someone that is looking to buy a laptop and want to know the standard memory capacity with the current day, then this article will enlighten you on this information.
To choose what kind of hard drive would you need for your laptop you must first consider what kind of data you are working with. Let’s say If editing and using photoshop or InDesign is your gig then you should estimate for a bigger storage device since that kind of work usually yields bigger data output, similarly, if you are a casual user that works on word documents then you shouldn’t be probably worried about space storage anytime sooner.
The size hard drive of a desktop is usually the same across all brands but in the case of Laptops hard drives tend to be 2.5 inches in size, quite smaller if you compare them to the desktop ones. And they can range from 120 GB to roughly around 4 Terabytes in storage capacity. For a casual consumer level, most laptops tend to have a storage capacity of around 500 GB to 1 TB, which seems quite sufficient
Although if you don’t consider yourself in that category and have extra duty workloads such as editing, playing big videogames, and saving entire episodes of your favorite Tv serials, then you should be looking for somewhere around 750 GB or larger storage sizes. And even that would be insufficient in due time
You should also keep in mind that the size of the hard drive doesn’t affect positively or negatively the shape or form of a laptop or Desktop. This means if you have a storage of 500 GB installed on your laptop, your laptop would perform at the same speeds as a laptop with a 1 TB hard drive, considering both have the same other hardware specifications.
Categories of DATA:
The file sizes are variable and can vary from one to another, we cant what kind of individual lies in which range but we can make categories that could help you better understand storage size and which would be suitable for your needs that being said data files can be put in a broad spectrum perspective of three types
- Light data usage
- Medium data usage
- Heavy data usage
We will explore each kind of data usage briefly below, which will give you insight into what kind of data you would need.
1: Light Data Usage
If you work in the office and your work mostly includes Documents such as presentations, spreadsheets, and word files. Then you can safely assume you fall in the category of light data usage individual due to the fact these files usually have lower space requirement and doesn’t take much space and even hundreds of such files would take up a mere couple of megabytes(MB), if this is the case with you then you don’t have to worry much about storage expansions. Usually, office desktops and laptops have light storage devices to carry out their day-to-day task
Even If you have light mp3 files that could range around 5mb-10 MB and some jpeg picture album then you could safely assume you lie in this category. And we suggest you should go for hard drive sizes that range from 250 to 500 GB which would be plenty for your usage.
2: Medium Data Usage
This is a category where an average user would fall, someone that likes to hoard high-quality music, videos, and general movies. Photography also comes under this branch as this includes high-definition images. Users who like to enjoy small games and standard-quality movies and tv shows are included in medium data usage.
Although these files aren’t alarming enough for you to consider expanding your storage size, you would still need sufficient space to compensate for all the files Users of medium data usage should go for 500 Gb to 1 TB hard drives
3: Heavy Data Usage
This specifically implies video games and files from editing software, they are huge in size, there are games that range from 50 to 100 GB each and a couple of them might fill your hard drive, this is due to the fact that high polygon and large resources assets are used in this making of these games.
Video editing software such as Adobe Premiere Pro yields bigger video output files usually in raw format that demand plenty of storage space.
This type of user should consider a shortage in storage devices soon and should purchase a hard drive that ranges from 1 TB to 4TB, to hold their precious files.
Conclusion:
Data management is a tough and expensive task and it is usually a hard decision what kind of storage size would be future-proof for your work, we tried our very best to simplify the categories to help you better understand so you can get the value for your investment.
You can also check out external storage drives and USB Flash drives which have the additional attribute of being portable and they are far cheaper than buying an internal hard drive altogether.USB flash drives usually come in a minimum of 4 GB, 8 GB, 16GB, and a maximum range of 1 TB.
Fortunately, there are plenty of sales on storage devices on Amazon and other such sites, that you purchase from for a very low price, that being said with this guide we hope you have a better idea of what storage size would be suitable for your needs.
