When buying a new SSD for the system (or upgrading from mechanical disk to SSD, of course) there are always doubts about which model and what type to choose, but what about the capacity? Nowadays it is relatively inexpensive to buy SSDs of up to 1TB, but do you need that much capacity in your SSD? Are you going to fall short? In this buying guide we are going to give you some tips to be right when choosing the right capacity depending on the use that you are going to give to the PC.
In the beginning of time, SSDs had capacities of 16, 32 and up to 64 GB, the largest, but currently these capacities are already discontinued, and in fact it is even difficult to find 128 GB drives, being 250/256 GB the smallest currently. However, the maximum capacity has been stretched to 2TB in the mid-range and we can even see devices of 4TB and more. So what is the right capacity for you?
The objective of this article is to advise you on what would be the right SSD size for you, so as not to overspend on an SSD that you are never going to fill, but also to not fall short for the future.
The right capacity for each type of user
Before you start buying an SSD of one size or another, you should consider what use you want to give it. For this, we will put the most typical scenarios in which you can find yourself:
- General office use: only for the operating system and some programs.
- PC gaming: operating system, programs and games.
- Content creation: operating system, programs and warehouse.
- Professional use.
For a user who only wants to have a faster PC but who only needs to have the operating system and some programs such as Office because most of the use it gives is to surf the Internet and use multimedia, it will not be necessary to have a large SSD capacity and with a 250/256 GB you will have more than enough , so you can go for the cheapest option available.
If on the contrary you have a PC gaming and in addition to the operating system and the usual programs you want to have your games installed, things change a lot and again it will depend on what type of gamer you are, since it is not the same to play 4-5 games than have 15-20 installed. Taking into account that today’s PC games occupy an average of about 30 GB per game (there are 10 and there are 60 or more GB), we would throw towards a capacity of between 500 GB and 1 TB .
For example, CODE VEIN, For The King, Minecraft, Black Desert Online, World War Z, Left 4 Dead 2, Portal 2, Resident Evil 3 REMAKE and League of Legends are installed in this games folder. Ten games that in total barely reach 160 GB.
If yours is the creation of content or you simply want to use the SSD as a warehouse , again it will depend on the type of content you are going to handle but the normal thing is that you want to go for units of 1 TB of capacity or more .
Finally, if you are a professional user , again it will depend on the type of content that you are going to handle since it is not the same a professional of the delineation that is going to use CAD programs that an audio engineer that uses Pro Tools. In any case, here the necessary capacities will vary between 500 GB and 2 TB depending on this.
What SSD capacity is right for you?
If we have to do a calculation for the average PC user, we will say that with 500 GB you will have more than enough for most scenarios, even if you are a gamer user and want to have your games installed you will have plenty of space for a good handful of them ( and if necessary you can always uninstall one to make room, right?
Today the capacity of SSDs is gradually increasing, and in fact it is the 500/512 GB drives that in terms of capacity / price have a better ratio and that it is more profitable to buy, although it is also true that the devices of 1 TB are coming in strong and we can find them every time for less money.
