I tried to put emphasis on the personal nature of the question in the title. I’m not asking for myself or the average individual. I also mean ideal in the way where cost is still a factor. The iPhone 16 Pro has a 1TB model but it’s around $500 more expensive than the 128GB version.

I imagine answers are going to vary significantly depending on an individuals approach like relying on cloud storage, SD cards, or a Magsafe NVMe drive for example.

I found 1TB (512GB on the phone and on the SD card) was ideal for me. I could keep the things I wanted for “just in case scenarios” like the files needed for the source ports of Diablo, Half Life, and Morrowind in case I want to play a game or some ebooks if I have time to read. I never needed to uninstall applications and shuffle things. I even had plenty of breathing room.

Another question I’d be interested in hearing people’s answers to is what is the minimum storage capacity you would consider for a phone. I don’t think I would buy a device with less than 256GB of potential storage. If it has an SD card slot that opens up the potential a significantly.

  • @RegalPotoo
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    13 hours ago

    I’ve used 85GB of the 128GB of my current phone after using it for 2 years and never deleting anything. I suppose if I took a lot more video I might burn through it quicker.

  • @[email protected]
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    13 hours ago

    My own usage is like 20-30GB in my experience (not including the OS and system stuff). So I’d say 128GB since the OS these days uses a ton of space.

    My ebooks all live on my kindle, but they really don’t use much space at all either way.

    If I needed to store stuff like games or something I’d just use a flash drive or portable SSD, much cheaper than buying a phone with more storage.

  • @[email protected]
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    8 hours ago

    The ideal amount of storage is enough that I literally never need to think about it, never need to delete anything, and never need to use cloud services for things that could realistically be local.

    It’s hard to say what that would be because I’ve never had a phone that even came close.

    The largest phone I’ve owned was 256GB. That was “fine”, but it was NOT big enough that I could fundamentally change my habits. For example, I don’t carry my entire music collection on my phone. I don’t even do that on my laptop anymore since the advent of SSDs.

    I have a 128GB phone now and it sucks. I’ve set up a one-way copy to my home desktop with Syncthing so I can safely delete photos, videos, and screen recordings from my phone. I need to do this frequently.

    With the standard price-gouging in the industry, I will probably settle for 256 with my next phone. If prices were reasonable, I’d go for 1TB at least.

    I miss SD cards but there are no viable options with slots anymore.

  • zerozaku
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    29 hours ago

    I feel 64gb should be the minimum. I had 32gb phone which I used for 6yrs and I used it without SD card. I could run it that long because I had unlimited gphotos backup which came with a custom ROM and I always has to clean it every month or so to have around 2gb free. Now I upgraded to 128gb, let’s see how it goes. Idk if I should opt to an SD card.

  • @[email protected]
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    19 hours ago

    Really depends what you’re chasing. If you want overall performance then 256GB is the better choice. It’s quite a bit faster than 128GB in terms of actual physical chip performance. There are diminishing returns in performance once you go above 256GB.

  • @mumei
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    211 hours ago

    I keep the bare minimum on my phone (something to read, music) and use very few apps, so 64GB could be enough for me, but I have other requirements for my phone and those often collide with storage so I never find anything with less than 128GB.

    I keep backups on my PC, and that’s where I funnel my funds for storage lol

      • @mumei
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        9 hours ago

        Currently using 12GB for system and 9GB for apps, then I have 30GB for music + documents + backups (that I mirror on PC) since I never stream anything, so 64GB would be a bit too tight for me haha

  • @[email protected]
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    312 hours ago

    256GB seems fine for me. I tend to have everything in the cloud in case I lose or damage my phone so actual use of the “hard drive” is fairly limited. I don’t really like playing such games on a phone and that’s the only scenario I can think of where I’d need so much space.

  • Blastboom Strice
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    19 hours ago

    I have a 256gb phone and the free space currently varies between 300 and 800mb.

    I’m very bad (too bored to do so) at deleting stuff on my phone (even if I have them backed up on my external drive), so the space fills up quickly. I have like ~100gb of camera files.🥲

    If I had an sd card I’d probably have some peace of mind and help me speed up the data transfers.

    I can’t exactly say how much space would be enough, but I think 256gb would be the minimum (or at least 128gb with an sd card option).

  • 56!
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    19 hours ago

    I have 32 GB, which is completely filled up by photos and music. If it had an SD card slot, I think I’d be fine with it. I’m going to have to use cloud storage soon to offload my photos, though that means I can’t access them as easily anymore.

  • @[email protected]
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    110 hours ago

    256 is plenty for me until I started adding lossless music. I don’t normally store a lot actually on my phone at any given time.

    My current phone is 1tb mostly for the memes. It even when I had an android phone with an SD card slot I didn’t bother using it since SD cards are fiddly garbage.

  • @[email protected]
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    212 hours ago

    64gb on the phone has been working for me for a long while now, though I did recently update my Micro SD to 64gb so I could save both my music and my books to it.

  • JackGreenEarth
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    212 hours ago

    My phone has 256GB storage and 512GB microSD. I definitely wouldn’t buy one with less than that, and even so I usually try to store redundant data on the microSD, data that can easily be redownloaded if anything happens to it, as it is a more fragile storage mechanism. Ideally I’d want my next phone to have at least 512GB internal storage, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to find one like that that also has everything else I want.

  • @jasep
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    110 hours ago

    I have 128 GB for my phone, and a 128 GB SD card. I also have a NAS, so other than the music I want to have on device on the SD card, I keep everything I care about on the NAS. I’ve been using Google Photos for picture management and storage, but I’m soon going to try out Immich and hopefully switch over to that.

    • @[email protected]
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      9 hours ago

      I also have a NAS, so other than the music I want to have on device on the SD card, I keep everything I care about on the NAS.

      This is the way. I also love the little coments on the cache size in the plexamp app:

  • @9point6
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    111 hours ago

    Half a terabyte. 256gb was what I went for for the past few years, but I’ve found that getting a bit tight on long plane journeys, so 512 from now on.