new computer advice

[bcla]

Well, as they say, your mileage may vary. I way way way overbought on storage when I bought my current Dell. I bought a 455 GB hard drive, anticipating lots of video and photo work on it. Didn't happen and 16 years later as i am looking to replace it, I still have 325 GB available!

My kid would have been fine with a 32 GB Chromebook or even a 128 GB Mac. If all you're doing is Microsoft Office or projects that don't have big files (like lots of video), those files don't use up that much storage anyways, and large files could be stored on an external drive or even on flash drives.

But I use mine to save a lot of audio and video files so I certainly like having more. If I was restricted to 512 GB then I'd have to find another way. It's more convenient having stuff on a main drive but it's not critical. There was some stuff I just moved off to an external hard drive because I was approaching getting full on my main 1 TB SSD. But I have all my Apple device backups on my Mac. Those can theoretically be moved to an external drive but it takes some expertise to set it up.

 

[fla4fun]

Well, as they say, your mileage may vary. I way way way overbought on storage when I bought my current Dell. I bought a 455 GB hard drive, anticipating lots of video and photo work on it. Didn't happen and 16 years later as i am looking to replace it, I still have 325 GB available!

I think part of it is down to how they divide up the storage. For most things, it’s a doubling factor, i.e., 128gb, 256gb, 512gb, etc. Take my current iPad. 256gb is too small for me because my current iPad is at almost 200gb used. However, I have most things installed that I need, so the odds of me filling up the rest of my 512gb any time soon is kind of slim. I would have felt comfortable with a 350gb or 400gb, but those options weren’t available to me.

Old school recommendations used to be buy double the amount you are actively using on your current machine, but with cloud storage that doesn’t apply so much anymore. If I were replacing one of my laptops, I might go kind of small on internal storage and buy an external storage drive to supplement it.

 

[bcla]

I think part of it is down to how they divide up the storage. For most things, it’s a doubling factor, i.e., 128gb, 256gb, 512gb, etc. Take my current iPad. 256gb is too small for me because my current iPad is at almost 200gb used. However, I have most things installed that I need, so the odds of me filling up the rest of my 512gb any time soon is kind of slim. I would have felt comfortable with a 350gb or 400gb, but those options weren’t available to me.

Old school recommendations used to be buy double the amount you are actively using on your current machine, but with cloud storage that doesn’t apply so much anymore. If I were replacing one of my laptops, I might go kind of small on internal storage and buy an external storage drive to supplement it.

It doesn't really have to be.

The other thing is how it gets reported. Drive capacity on the label is usually where 1 GB = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. But in electronics 1 GB is 1,073,741,824 (2^30) bytes. I remember when Apple went from reporting capacity as the latter and changed it to the former when people started

I don't know exactly how it works, but a lot of the newer SSDs are just a single "chip" although with current technology it can be a lot of smaller silicon dies in the same package, where the number can be somewhat random. I've seen some SSDs from the same manufacturer in the same line sold as 500 GB or 512 GB. But there really is no specific reason why it has to double. 1 TB is typically just double 500 GB, but could theoretically be considered double 512 GB. I remember when SSDs were extremely expensive and somewhat new, I recall they'd typically be 80/120/200/240/480 GB.

Another thing to consider in the capacity is "overprovisioning" where there's actually more capacity than on the label and it's either not used or there's a way to quarantine failing blocks and substitute previously unused blocks. In memories there's almost always going to be failure and they use "spares" and a way to disable bad sectors and enable replacements.