I run a gaming laptop. My OS drive is a 500gb NVMe. My gaming drive is a 1tb NVMe. And then I have a 5tb storage drive... for downloads.

Does it have to be for gaming?

Because my Plex server has 122TB of storage.

29tb on my PC

24.5TB usable on primary NAS

24TB usable on my backup NAS

36TB usable on my off-site data center NAS

That's actually a difficult question to answer

On my main rig I have 3 TB of space, 1 of which is an M.2 the rest are SATA SSDs. But it has access to my NAS†

Then there's the secondary rig that runs my 3D printing corner which has 1 TB of space and also has access to my NAS†

†My NAS is a bit special, it has about 44TB of space in RAIS Z2, this thing is connected to all of my devices.

I have plans to update my NAS to something less power hungry as it's currently running on a 12 year old hunk of server hardware with dual CPUs and 192GB of RAM.

Edit: Spleling and slight clarification

From experience i can safely say you never have enough

Started with a 250gb hdd in a laptop Moved to a 1TB hdd PC, Added a 500GB SSD… I am still using both as extra space but i added 3 TB nvme

I also build franksteined server pc wich has about 12GB of hdd space (but only 8TB which i consider safe for important files)

It is never enough.

When i had that original 250gb it felt Much larger then all the space i have now.

500 GB SSD as main boot and application drive

500 GB SSD as one game drive

2 TB SSD as second game drive (added after 500 GB one filled up)

1 TB HDD as bulk storage (had it for many years now)

1 TB HDD for photographs (also had for many years)

2 TB RAID array for video editing

8 TB external HDD for backup

So 7 TB internal, and 8 TB backup

Boot drive is 1TB. Currently 176GB free with 21 games installed (BG3 is definitely the largest lol) and all my other non-gaming stuff.

Also have a combined 30TB in external HDD's (with about 1TB free) as my PC is also a Plex server, but that's not game related (well cept roms lol).

Server is at about 50tb or so. Main PC is at about 25tb. I'm completely out of sata ports and if I add anything else anywhere, will have to either swap the hard drives or use a card to get more.

Only around 2T of NVMe on my gaming PC.

My NAS has around 140T total. (128T spinning rust, the rest is NVMe).

Along with another 10T of NVMe in my proxmox cluster.

240Gb, enough to play OpenTTD and Rollercoaster Tycoon

250GB boot SSD, 2TB internal HDD, 4TB external HDD. Fortunately I haven't had to install any AAA games recently, because all of them are pretty much full.

Around 20,5 TB.

8 of them are only used for movies, series, and audio files.

I have a 4TB NVMe and a 2TB NVMe for 6TB total.

As for my NAS, I have 160TB lol, but that's not mainly for games.

This is skewed as I do video editing, but I have a casual 112TB external raid array in addition to the 56TB in my machine. That’s not including the NAS, backups, or the other machines. Between all of my machines plus on and off sight backups, I’m probably just shy of a PB.

I have

240g ssd

500g boot drive m.w

2tb barracuda

12 tb server drive (got it for abour 120)

Total is about 11TB:

1x 2TB SSD

1x 1TB SSD

2x 4TB HDD

I have a 256GB “OS” SSD 1 TB SSD for games 2 TB HDD for longer term storage

My computer is pretty old. When I eventually upgrade I’ll do a 1TB nvme os and one for games with a 5TB hybrid storage I think.

My XBOX has the internal 1TB then 4TB of USB3 storage for 360/XBOX One games (or Series games I'm not currently playing). Main PC is 500GB SSD Raid 0 System drive, 1TB NVMe data drive and a 6TB HDD Storage Space. Then my NAS has 20TB (RAID 5) of space for everything else. (Including a full set of install files of any games I bought via GoG since you can keep their DRM free install files just in case GoG suddenly disappear)

With all my games consoles I have 8TB combined. On my desktop I have 16TB.

It might seem like a lot but I manually back up my console games in case the disc gets damaged or the disc drive fails.

12tb

Two 2tb NVMEs, one standard 4tb drive, and a 4tb external.

And then I have my NAS which adds some more too

500GB. I wanted to get more storage but then i realized that with 1gbit internet connection, i dont need it, i can download whatever i want in a few minutes. Fast internet is a game changer, it allows me to try and test games without thinking about it.

I also have a 2tB hdd for media but i dont use that to store games.

5 TB in total. Let's break it down.

• 500 MB NVME drive (boot)
• 1 TB SSD (Games)
• 1 TB Work Hard Drive
• 2 TB Supplementary Hard Drive
• 500 MB NAS via adjacent HTPC (I use it for music, photos, videos, and ROMS for emulators)

The only one I'm getting close to filling it the 1 TB SSD, but I'm always happy to look into upgrading.

I have:

• a 1 TB system SSD (the fast M.2 Samsung SSD 970 EVO) where Windows and Fedora are installed
• a 2 TB games SSD (the slow M.2 Intel SSD 660p)
• a 120G games SSD (the very old, slow SATA Crucial M500) that only still exists because it would be a shame to throw out.

All the spinning rust has been banished to the NAS, Minecraft server, friend's sister's PC etc. The NAS now holds two 16 TB drives (SEAGATE Exos X16) in a raid 1, of that volume 5 TB are still free.

Steam Deck with 3 TB. 1 TB SD card, and 2 TB NVME.

2TB SSD. I hate running out of storage.

Pc has 4 TB of SSD Storage, 2 M.2 drives one SSD, then a 2 TB HDD for 6 TB total

PC: The laptop has a half a terabyte SSD, and 2 TB USB HDD for Steam games. (Plus a boatload of other storage for other purposes.)

Xbox Series X: 1 TB internal, two additional 1 TB storage cards for X/S games, a 4 TB HDD for Xbox One and Xbox 360 games, and a 2 TB USB HDD for cold storage of X/S games.

Nintendo Switch: I don't remember how big the SD card is, but it's too damn tiny anyways.

I have to say, despite having a bunch of space, I do spend time deleting and redownloading games. Meanwhile, my Xbox 360 has a 1 TB USB2 HDD, and... uh, it comfortably fits all of the digital purchases I ever made.

Funny thing, the other 1 TB card for XSX is taken almost entirely by Microsoft Flight Simulator and Train Sim World 3. And also The Sims 4. All of these simulators eat a buuuunch of space.

12TB hdd, 500gb m.2ssd

~7-8tb used on HDD, prob like 400gb used on ssd

2TB SSD main drive. And a 2TB HDD file history drive.

I have 1 TB of nvme storage on my main machine (one ssd). I upgraded a few months ago and I need more storage.

My PS5 has 3.5 TB. 1TB internal, plus 2TB NVME, plus 512GB external.

My PC has 1TB NVME for windows, a 2TB NVME game drive, a 512GB NVME I'm not really sure what for yet, a 4TB SATA SSD backups drive, and 2TBs SATA SSD for media/downloads/older games. I also have an external 8TB HDD fo backups. So 9.5 TB of SSDs and 8TB external.

SSD prices have dropped massively lately. You should get a 2TB NVME drive, which you can easily find for $100 or less.

My desktop has roughly 350gb of a terabyte left after only a couple years. Definitely gonna have to delete a bunch of files in order to clear up space. That, and actually complete some of the games I started so I can uninstall them to save space.

Hell, I might even have to uninstall Portal 2 since it's the biggest offender of all the games on my PC, if I recall correctly.

Edit:

Just looked it up and Portal 2 is only taking up 12.94 gb where as Cities: Skylines is taking up 16.87 gb but that's not the end of it. Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony is taking up a massive 21.77 gb and Steam itself blows all of that out of the water, taking up 71.12 gb on my computer and is the largest program on it as well. Closet other non-game program on my computer takes up 70 gb less at 1.06 gb which is insane to me!

On my regular desktop PC? 1.5TB spread between three drives, not using half of it. My NAS has 4TB and I'm using about 80% of it so will need to upgrade that at some point. For a supposed IT professional I really don't use that much storage.

Probably another 2TB or so spread among the various servers and Raspberry Pis I have kicking around the place, but none of them are used for anything important.

I have 250gb, but I am a simple man. I uninstall the games I don't play and I dont downloading game more that 50gb because its just stupid.

2x2TB NVMe 2x4TB SSD

2 TB NVme, 6 TB in regular HDDs.

Main Desktop: 4.5TB spread across 3 SSDs File Server: 30TB of raw storage

• 2 TB nvme for windows + apps + steam/games + cloud drive (google drive) + user data

• 1 TB SSD for personal offline data / photos / torrent.

21 TB overall.

I run a Linux gaming desktop. I have 4 TB of SSD storage and 16 TB of mechanical storage. Boot drive is another 1 TB SSD, so 21 TB in total.

my PC has less than 2TB spread accross multiple drives, SSDs and HDDs as well. I'm running a Pi as a server, with 1TB SSD in it. Also have a 4TB backup disk, which is currently installed in my main PC, but don't really use it as an "active" storage.

but I just had a flashback to around 2000, when the whole family went to a PC shop to buy our first machine. It had a whopping 20GB HDD in it! we all was like "oh lord, this disk is HUGE! it's impossible to fill up!"

needless to say, it wasn't. sometime later my next machine had 80 gigs and I almost got dizzy on the thought how freaking much is that. spoiler alert: it wasn't that big afterall 😅

I think the faster your connection, the less you can get away with for drive space. At one point, I was living in a place where the absolute fastest available internet was 1.5 meg dsl and where my actual connection speed hovered around dialup levels. I had massive amounts of local storage because I didn’t want to download anything more than once, and nothing was more soul crushing than getting a game on dvd so I didn’t have to worry about downloading it, and then still have to wait while it downloaded gigs worth of patches. Buying a game meant days of downloading, which I’d have to let run while at work because literally nothing else could be happening while a download was occurring. I now have gigabit ethernet.

I moved completely over to a steam deck for pc gaming. I rarely even think about how long a game takes to download, even in the case of a game like BG3 (which is great, btw - it’s a shockingly legit successor to the BG franchise and this is going to be one of those games that people remember for a decade or more).

In any case, I bought a deck with 512G a few months ago, and grabbed a 1tb card for it. I haven’t downloaded my entire library onto it, much less any non-steam games, but I find that the ability to go from thinking about playing a game to playing it in about the time it takes to get and eat a sandwich vastly changes the equation. Non-AAA games download in minutes.

Anyway, upgrading your internet speed may not be something available to everyone, because many places still have crap infrastructure, and some ISPs still have data caps. Mine thankfully doesn’t because I ended up moving so much data downloading to my new deck on top of 4k video streaming that I would be blowing through it monthly.

If you can’t upgrade your speed, upgrade your storage. You can use cheaper external drives with physical platters and either store games on there that don’t throttle on low rate io, or at least store the install files for games that you can then move over to your ssd. Back in the day when a 40mb hdd was considered large, we used to write scripts that would compress and uncompress games on the fly. I think wing commander with the voice pack by itself took up most of my drive.

tl;dr Think about investing in one or a few tb of external storage.