How Much Storage Do Gamers Really Need?
How much storage do you really need?
Less than some people will tell you, but probably more than you think.
The reality is that modern games now take up massive amounts of storage, and yes I'm looking at you Call of Duty!
Jokes aside, AAA games today use lots of storage but the question of how much storage you need as a gamer is a real question to think about, especially with the cost of storage as it is at the moment.
When I sat down to install our benchmark games, I was reminded just how quickly modern games fill a drive. Call of Duty alone is well over 200GB if you install multiple modes.
In terms of raw storage this really depends on the games that you play. If you play games like Paralives and indie games you wouldn't need much, Paralives uses 8GBs of space so you could easily use a 256GB SSD.
However Paralives is an outlier in our opinion, because 8gb’s of used space is incredibly low for today's games. Let's look at some games that many people play today.
Baldurs Gate 3 - 150GB’s
Counter-Strike 2 - 85GB’s
Call of Duty Warzone -125GB’s
CyberPunk 2077 - 70GB’s
Battlefield 6 - 80GB’s
007 First Light - 53GB’s
So when we look at this we see that modern games need a lot of storage.
This is something that we have seen growing over time. Using the Batman Arkham series as a benchmark for this it shows how much storage needs have escalated
Batman Arkham Asylum - 8GB’s released 2010
Batman Arkham City - 17GB’s - released 2012
Batman Arkham Origins - 20GB’s released 2013
Batman Arkham Knight - 55GB’s released 2015
As you can see the storage needs grew as the games progressed over time, and they seem to be continuing that trajectory. Yet costs for storage now have risen dramatically, and unfortunately, this hasn't just affected one capacity. Whether you're looking at 512GB, 1TB or larger drives, SSD prices have all risen significantly over the last year .
So what should gamers do?
If you're buying a system today we would recommend focusing on one good quality SSD to house your operating system and a few games to start with.
Yes you will have to manage the games you play and that means uninstalling things you're not playing. Realistically we recommend 500GB’s or more as a minimum to begin with, this allows you to get your operating system on there and a few great games to play. The sweet spot in our opinion for most gamers would be currently 1TB SSD, this gives you the space to not have to manage games as much and having to take a game out of your system to play something new.
So that covers size but what about speed?
For gaming alone, most people won't notice a meaningful difference between a good Gen 3 SSD and a Gen 5 SSD. The time you WILL notice that is if you're moving large files around, so a video editor would benefit from a gen 5 SSD but most of us probably wont.
There are some things that I would not recommend for gamers. An old school spinning hard drive is something no gamer should put into their system, this WILL impact your gaming experience and is something that i would ignore completely.
But what about SATA SSD?
Again much like a spinning hard drive this isn't something I would look at for most people I speak to. Yet the SATA SSD’s have their place, in fact I still use a SATA SSD in my own PC for older games and general storage. It isn't the fastest option, but it works perfectly well for that job.
Does SATA impact gaming performance? Yes, does it impact it enough to make me say no to it? No
The fact that I use one every day shows that they certainly have their place.
Realistically we would recommend to start with going for a single great NVME SSD that gives you space to get up and running. Then adding in a second NVME SSD for game storage at a later date.
In terms of speeds I would recommend going for at a minimum of GEN 3 speeds and this will give you a great balance of speeds and value for money.
This is why we use the drives that we do because they balance speeds, size, value and manufacturer reputation.
The last thing to consider is that when you look online you find dozens of ‘no name’ brands for SSD’s that are very good value for money. These are something I wouldn't recommend at the moment because we just don't know if these manufacturers are reliable.
However we must remember that companies like Lexar, Silicon Power, Sabrent, ADATA/XPG are all organisations that were at some point thought to be in that ‘no name’ bracket and now they are used world wide and trusted companies.
Will companies like KingSpec, KingBank, Biwin, or Fanxiang move from that ‘no name’ realm to mainstream?
Only time and testing will tell.
This is in fact something we are planning on testing so that we can provide you the answers to this.
Choosing storage shouldn't be confusing. Our job is to test the hardware, cut through the marketing, and recommend what we'd genuinely use ourselves.
We make sure we do the hard work so that you don't have to.