How much space does Windows 10 take

Ever wondered how much space does Windows 10 take on your laptop or desktop computers? In this article, I’ll be detailing every aspect of how much storage does Windows 10 take upon a fresh installation, and the ideal storage consumed by Windows after using and installing programs on it.

You might probably have hard disk drives (HDD) or solid-state drives (SSD) as your primary storage on your computers. Regardless of which type of technology you are using, you still want to end up minimizing the amount of unnecessary files stored inside these drives for optimal performance! Let’s go ahead and analyze the storage consumed by Windows 10 in detail!

How much space does Windows 10 take?

The storage capacity consumed by Windows 10 has a lot of factors affecting it. Starting from the device drivers, software updates, pre-installed software installations, and so on. However, generally speaking, we will look into the actual HDD or SSD capacity needed by Windows 10 given the most “general” kind of Windows 10 setup.

#1: Fresh Installation

On a fresh Windows 10 installation, the Windows folder itself already consumed a hefty 27.2 GB of storage alone. This storage does not include the Program Files and other user data folders that could also consume a few gigabytes of storage. Microsoft’s minimum free disk requirements when installing Windows 10 Operating System is at least 32 GB of free disk capacity.

Windows updates could also increase the storage consumption of Windows upon initial installation. Thus, the minimum requirement of at least 32 GB of free disk capacity is quite reasonable.

#2: Actual Usage

The actual storage capacity usage of Windows 10 will definitely increase over time as you will have to store your documents, files and folders as well as software installations such as productivity and office, photo and video editors, document processor, or even games on your computer.

However, there’s actually no definitive amount of “enough” storage as the actual storage consumption varies depending on user activity. In my case, having all the software and programs installed on my device, Program and Files alone already consumes 48 GB of storage! That 48 Gigabytes of storage already includes the entire collection of Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, Audition, Illustrator) along with other productivity software such as Microsoft Office, etc.

It is advisable to have at least 50 GB of free storage space if you’re a minimal user that doesn’t do heavy tasks on Windows 10. Take note also that the storage consumption doesn’t include any games on my computer as typically, modern games nowadays use 20 GB up to even 150 GB of storage space or even more! It is advisable to keep these games on a hard drive as it’s much more cost-effective and only keep the frequently used apps and programs on your system drive that’s hopefully already on a solid-state drive (SSD).

Conclusion

There is no definitive way of answering how much storage space is practically enough for you or for someone as again, it depends on the user activity. However, having an idea on how much storage space does Windows 10 take is crucial to have a baseline on the minimum system storage space do you really need to have on your laptop or desktop computers. Ideally, in the terms of storage, the more the better.

Hopefully this article will help you better understand the usage consumption of your operating system specifically Windows 10! Share this article or leave your comments, feedbacks or questions down below.