Data Storage Needs Calculator
Add up your photos, video, music, apps, and documents to see the total in GB and TB — and the drive or plan size to buy, with sensible headroom built in.
Buy storage once, not twice
Whether it’s the next phone, an external SSD, or a home NAS, the trap is buying just enough and running out within the year. Video is the big driver — a few hours of 4K dwarfs a whole photo library — so estimating each category separately, then adding headroom, is how you land on a size that lasts rather than one you outgrow.
Building a media library? See how much bandwidth streaming and downloads need with the Internet Speed Needs tool, and pair a TV to the room with the TV Size & Viewing Distance calculator.
Frequently Asked Questions
How big is a typical photo or video file?
This tool uses common averages: about 5 MB for a smartphone photo, 3 GB per hour of HD video, and 20 GB per hour of 4K video, plus roughly 8 MB per music track. Your files can differ a lot — a RAW photo from a mirrorless camera is many times larger than a phone JPEG, and high-bitrate 4K can exceed the estimate — so it's a planning figure, not a file-by-file audit.
Why does the recommendation exceed my total?
Because a drive you fill to the brim is a drive that's about to cause problems. The calculator adds roughly 40% headroom before picking the next standard capacity, leaving room for growth, temporary files, and the fact that both SSDs and hard drives slow down and wear faster when nearly full. It's the difference between buying storage once and re-buying it in six months.
Do phones and drives really give you their labelled capacity?
Not quite. A '256 GB' phone loses a chunk to the operating system and pre-installed apps, and drive makers count a gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 bytes while your computer counts 1,073,741,824 — so a '1 TB' drive shows up as about 931 GB. Sizing up to the next standard capacity, as this tool does, absorbs both effects so you don't come up short.
Should I buy one big drive or use the cloud?
Often both. Local storage — a bigger phone, an SSD, or a NAS — is fast and one-time, while cloud plans are ongoing but add offsite backup and easy sharing. Use this estimate to right-size the local device, then treat the cloud as a backup layer rather than your only copy. For a home library that keeps growing, a NAS with room to add drives is usually the cheaper long-run choice.
Estimates only. Per-item sizes are typical averages; your real files vary with camera, codec, and bitrate. Sizes up to the next standard capacity for headroom.