What do you feel is your ideal amount of storage for a phone?
What do you feel is your ideal amount of storage for a phone?
I tried to put emphasis on the personal nature of the question in the title. I'm not asking for myself or the average individual. I also mean ideal in the way where cost is still a factor. The iPhone 16 Pro has a 1TB model but it's around $500 more expensive than the 128GB version.
I imagine answers are going to vary significantly depending on an individuals approach like relying on cloud storage, SD cards, or a Magsafe NVMe drive for example.
I found 1TB (512GB on the phone and on the SD card) was ideal for me. I could keep the things I wanted for "just in case scenarios" like the files needed for the source ports of Diablo, Half Life, and Morrowind in case I want to play a game or some ebooks if I have time to read. I never needed to uninstall applications and shuffle things. I even had plenty of breathing room.
Another question I'd be interested in hearing people's answers to is what is the minimum storage capacity you would consider for a phone. I don't think I would buy a device with less than 256GB of potential storage. If it has an SD card slot that opens up the potential a significantly.
256GB seems fine for me. I tend to have everything in the cloud in case I lose or damage my phone so actual use of the "hard drive" is fairly limited. I don't really like playing such games on a phone and that's the only scenario I can think of where I'd need so much space.
The ideal amount of storage is enough that I literally never need to think about it, never need to delete anything, and never need to use cloud services for things that could realistically be local.
It's hard to say what that would be because I've never had a phone that even came close.
The largest phone I've owned was 256GB. That was "fine", but it was NOT big enough that I could fundamentally change my habits. For example, I don't carry my entire music collection on my phone. I don't even do that on my laptop anymore since the advent of SSDs.
I have a 128GB phone now and it sucks. I've set up a one-way copy to my home desktop with Syncthing so I can safely delete photos, videos, and screen recordings from my phone. I need to do this frequently.
With the standard price-gouging in the industry, I will probably settle for 256 with my next phone. If prices were reasonable, I'd go for 1TB at least.
I miss SD cards but there are no viable options with slots anymore.
I had a 256GB phone and after 1 year had used less than half the space, without ever deleting anything, so when i upgraded this time I saved money and got the 128GB model. I sync my photos/videos to my NAS so can purge those from my phone at any time to save space. That's really the only thing that takes up any significant storage.
I've used 85GB of the 128GB of my current phone after using it for 2 years and never deleting anything. I suppose if I took a lot more video I might burn through it quicker.
I keep the bare minimum on my phone (something to read, music) and use very few apps, so 64GB could be enough for me, but I have other requirements for my phone and those often collide with storage so I never find anything with less than 128GB.
I keep backups on my PC, and that's where I funnel my funds for storage lol
My phone has 256GB storage and 512GB microSD. I definitely wouldn't buy one with less than that, and even so I usually try to store redundant data on the microSD, data that can easily be redownloaded if anything happens to it, as it is a more fragile storage mechanism. Ideally I'd want my next phone to have at least 512GB internal storage, but I don't know if I'll be able to find one like that that also has everything else I want.
64gb on the phone has been working for me for a long while now, though I did recently update my Micro SD to 64gb so I could save both my music and my books to it.
My own usage is like 20-30GB in my experience (not including the OS and system stuff). So I'd say 128GB since the OS these days uses a ton of space.
My ebooks all live on my kindle, but they really don't use much space at all either way.
If I needed to store stuff like games or something I'd just use a flash drive or portable SSD, much cheaper than buying a phone with more storage.
I feel 64gb should be the minimum. I had 32gb phone which I used for 6yrs and I used it without SD card. I could run it that long because I had unlimited gphotos backup which came with a custom ROM and I always has to clean it every month or so to have around 2gb free. Now I upgraded to 128gb, let's see how it goes. Idk if I should opt to an SD card.
256 is plenty for me until I started adding lossless music. I don’t normally store a lot actually on my phone at any given time.
My current phone is 1tb mostly for the memes. It even when I had an android phone with an SD card slot I didn’t bother using it since SD cards are fiddly garbage.
I'm currently at a slim 132GB over the course of a year, and that includes a good size library of RPG pdfs. I should probably save more music to my phone to save on bandwidth. I feel kind of uncomfortable going bellow 512GB storage but I clearly don't need most of that.
I survived on an 8gb storage phone with a 32gb sdcard for many years.
Was that recently?
Yep!
I have 128 GB for my phone, and a 128 GB SD card. I also have a NAS, so other than the music I want to have on device on the SD card, I keep everything I care about on the NAS. I've been using Google Photos for picture management and storage, but I'm soon going to try out Immich and hopefully switch over to that.
I also have a NAS, so other than the music I want to have on device on the SD card, I keep everything I care about on the NAS.
This is the way. I also love the little coments on the cache size in the plexamp app:
I have a 256gb phone and the free space currently varies between 300 and 800mb.
I'm very bad (too bored to do so) at deleting stuff on my phone (even if I have them backed up on my external drive), so the space fills up quickly. I have like ~100gb of camera files.🥲
If I had an sd card I'd probably have some peace of mind and help me speed up the data transfers.
I can't exactly say how much space would be enough, but I think 256gb would be the minimum (or at least 128gb with an sd card option).
Half a terabyte. 256gb was what I went for for the past few years, but I've found that getting a bit tight on long plane journeys, so 512 from now on.
Ideally, 256 GB + microSD. 128 GB today gives me ample room for my offline maps, music collection, podcasts, and Kiwix libraries. No gaming, only the occasional video, and one photo per day on average, so 256 GB would future-proof it.
As for a minimum, 32GB. For several years, I had a phone with 4GB of internal storage. Didn't use the microSD slot since it seemed to drain the battery. Android takes up much more space nowadays, but I wouldn't be too upset having ~16 GB usable space for myself.
The SD card would be separately encrypted as a portable backup of everything important to me, accessible on-the-spot whenever I need it.
Really depends what you're chasing. If you want overall performance then 256GB is the better choice. It's quite a bit faster than 128GB in terms of actual physical chip performance. There are diminishing returns in performance once you go above 256GB.
I have 32 GB, which is completely filled up by photos and music. If it had an SD card slot, I think I'd be fine with it. I'm going to have to use cloud storage soon to offload my photos, though that means I can't access them as easily anymore.