Specrove / Storage calculator
How much phone storage do I need?
Storage is the one thing you cannot upgrade after you buy, and the one thing every phone is sold short of. Answer six questions and get a size based on your habits rather than a guess.
If they do, older photos come off the phone automatically and take far less space.
Enter the prices you are actually seeing. Cost per gigabyte shows which tier is priced fairly; the step cost shows what you really pay for the extra space.
| Tier | Price | Per GB | Step up | Verdict |
|---|
A phone close to full slows down, fails to install updates, and stops recording video mid-clip. Aim to stay under about 80% of capacity for the life of the phone. That headroom is built into the figure above, which is why the recommendation sits above your raw usage.
| What | Roughly | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| System | 12–18 GB | Gone before you install anything |
| One photo | 3 MB | About 340 photos per GB |
| 1080p video | 65 MB / min | 15 minutes per GB |
| 4K video | 190 MB / min | 5 minutes per GB |
| Large mobile game | 5–15 GB | Three games can equal a year of photos |
| 1,000 songs offline | 4 GB | Cheaper than most people assume |
| One series, downloaded | 8–15 GB | The quiet storage killer |
These are working averages, not measurements. File sizes vary with the phone, the codec and the scene — a static shot compresses far smaller than a moving one.