So, when a machine has 512 Gt of storage, what does that actually amount to? Like, after you have removed the mcafees and other bloatware and just updated everything, what do you end up with, right now?
Interested cause i really can’t afford 1t right now. 
Well when you buy a 512Gb drive you actually get 476 Gb because of windows using GiB instead of Gb. The Windows installation usually take 20-25 Gb so I would say you will end up with around 450 or maybe 440 Gb of disk space. I hope this helps you!
@Marlon
Yes, it does help. Thank you for this info. 
Zayne said:
@Marlon
Yes, it does help. Thank you for this info.
From the base 476 it is recommended to save 10-20% to be empty. Otherwise SSD might suffer performance loss and reach its read/write limit faster. So that puts us closer to ~370 Gigs
@Neve
10-20% is for HDD, 5-10% for SSD.
@Neve
That is also a good thing to know. Thanks, i forgot about that.
Windows is around 50gb. That’s it. You use Windows defender and that is all you need.
Arley said:
Windows is around 50gb. That’s it. You use Windows defender and that is all you need.
Thanks for the advice
Depends on what game you play. But to put it into perspective, Forza Horizon 5 wanted 160GB, Cyberpunk 2077 wanted 70GB, and any modern COD would be 100+ GB.
A modern game is around 30-50GB.
Anyway, it’s doable, you just need to keep only a game or two at a time.
Also buying a SSD and installing yourself is also an option, depending on how many slots your laptop have.
@Axel
Thanks. That does help. Seems that gacha games have skewed my understanding of game sizes a bit, cause they are usually bigger. Thankfully i don’t really play that much of them anymore, and limit the amount that’s on my mobile to one at a time too.
But yeah, additional SSD is definitely an option. And if I get really cowardly (warranty) I’ll just get an external hard drive to help. Anyway, I can certainly live with just having fewer games available on my laptop.
Tops 450 GB of storage including windows installation, fine if you have a small game library or games with smaller storage sizes.
You could separately buy a 1TB they usually sell for like 55-60 bucks
Zyler said:
You could separately buy a 1TB they usually sell for like 55-60 bucks
That is definitely an option. Yeah.
Well, it’s not much. With windows, you’d have about 450 GB to install games. Most games now are huge (possibly 100+GB) so you’re limited to about 3-5 triple A games, if you don’t store anything else.
My laptop came with 512GB but I’ve expanded it to 3 TB internally, with about 4 TB more in external drives. It’s more than most people need but I live to hoard data and store it locally.
@Arie
Do I remember correctly that one could also play games from an external SSD storage? 
Kinda scared of doing anything internally, doesn’t it remove the warranty?
Buy a 512 and get 1TB separately when you can. When I was buying my laptop the price difference between 512 and 1TB was the same as a whole stick of 1TB NVMe drive. (So essentially I’m paying the price of 1TB for extra 512GB).
And I waited a couple of months till my storage was starting to be limiting and by then prices had gone down like 30%.
Normal Windows 10-11 installations can gradually eat up to 100-200GB of your space if you don’t limit and clean them wisely.
Raven said:
Normal Windows 10-11 installations can gradually eat up to 100-200GB of your space if you don’t limit and clean them wisely.
Uuf. That is starting to sound brutal 
Raven said:
Normal Windows 10-11 installations can gradually eat up to 100-200GB of your space if you don’t limit and clean them wisely.
Uuf. That is starting to sound brutal
I would recommend you try Optimum or some of those debloated Windows versions.
You should be fine if you don’t play more than 12 games