Storage space. In just about every corner of our lives, it seems like more space is better. A bigger office is better, and so is a larger home. Garages across America are filled with stuff, not cars — and of course storage unit facilities are popping up just about everywhere.
Why? Because all the stuff we own has to live somewhere. Either we need to trim down our amount of stuff, or we have to find adequate space to store it.
Device storage is similar: the more (digital) stuff we accumulate, the more space we need. Deciding how much a business needs for various devices is in some ways a new complication, too.
The Calculation Has Changed (Because Hardware Has Changed)
A couple of decades ago, the question of storage space wasn’t as pressing. If you needed more storage space, you (or your IT tech) could open up your desktop tower and pop in a second hard drive, or replace the main hard drive with a much larger one. This was relatively easy to do.
Fast-forward to today: many modern laptops and virtually all mobile devices work differently. There are no hard drives; instead there’s a new type of storage (solid state drives, or SSD). And for many products, those SSDs are fused to the device. You can’t just open up your iPhone, for example, and pop in a new SSD.
So the amount of storage you have when you buy a device is, in many cases, the maximum amount of storage that device will have for its entire life. Space isn’t upgradable.
The Need Has Changed (Because of the Cloud)
On the other hand, we interact with storage space differently than we did a decade or two ago. Back then, one of the primary consumer use cases for needing more storage was media: us old-timers had gigabytes upon gigabytes of MP3s, and downloaded video content took up even more space. Most consumers today don’t do any of that; they just stream it all (which doesn’t require storage space).
How To Determine the Right Amount of Storage Space for Business Devices
So this brings us back to the main reason for this blog post: when it’s time to upgrade devices, how do you decide what storage level to pay for?
Ask these questions to help make this decision.
1. What are you using the device for?
Start with the basics: is this a laptop or desktop that an employee will use for email, spreadsheets, document prep, and…not much more? Then the minimum amount of storage available (often 64 or 128 GB) is likely just fine.
The same goes for a mobile device used for basic tasks like talking, texting, video calling, and email. These don’t need much storage space at all.
But if you’re doing serious work with industry applications (especially anything graphical), you’ll need more than the base level. In general, the more detailed or specialized the work, the more power and storage you’ll probably want.
2. Do you take (or edit) lots of photos or videos?
The next question is about media creation, not consumption: is this a mobile device that field employees will use to take pictures and video that factors into the work you do? Then 64 GB is going to fill up awfully quickly! If it’s a PC that belongs to someone doing light media work (like photo editing), you’d probably want more. And if you’re doing anything with video editing, you’ll want a lot more.
Final Thoughts
Most office devices will probably be fine with 128 GB. If a user or device needs to store more files locally than your typical office worker, then bumping up to 256 or 512 GB is a good move. Devices that create or edit media will need more, possibly a lot more (256 GB up to 1-2 TB).
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