Calculating / Estimating Computer HD Storage Needs

As your current old Mac currently has a 1TB drive capacity and you're only using ~10%, I would suggest your next Mac be spec'd with another 1TB drive. If you expect to use more capacity with additional videos as you suggest, the 1TB internal drive will give you a great start, and it will be easy enough to add external storage for those larger files as you find the capacity of the internal diminishing with use.

If you can afford 2TB, then by all means, consider taking advantage of that. You will be unable to upgrade the internal storage after purchase due to the way the Mx Macs incorporate their storage.

For the healthy performance of your Mac, it's generally advised to maintain ~10%-20% of the startup drive capacity free and available for the OS to have room to stretch out when necessary.

I would be surprised if you could tell the difference between 7-cores and 8-cores in everyday use, so don't sweat the small stuff.

anonymous-imac-user wrote:

Thanks so much for your thoughtful reply, D.I. Johnson.

What's a "startup drive"? How does that relate to storage? Could you recommend a percentage for "free and available" storage?

You're welcome.

The startup drive is just another term for the boot drive. It's the (usually) internal drive on which the macOS comes installed from the factory and from which the computer retrieves the operating system data required to startup when you turn it on. In addition to being the boot drive, it is also a storage device wherein your user account data, Home folder and personal files are all kept.

When I said "free and available", I simply meant the portion of the total capacity of the drive that should always remain unused. The MacOS requires room to swap data in and out of the startup drive to maintain reasonable performance. If you let the drive fill up too much, then performance takes a hit and you may even run the risk of the computer failing to be able to start up.

A good rule of thumb is to never allow the available storage on the startup drive to fall below 10%-20% of the total capacity of that drive. So with a 1TB (1000GB) drive, never allow the space available to fall below 100GB (10% of drive capacity).

One important question has been overlooked. Does it require a special app to retrieve the body cam footage? If so, then that app may only allow for downloading the data to the internal drive. Even if the app allows downloading the footage to an external drive, some apps may first require the footage to be store temporarily on the internal drive. We've had trouble retrieving security camera footage for this very reason.

Another question is how much data is stored on a body cam as that may also be a determining factor for the size of the Mac's internal drive possibly depending on how the footage is retrieved.

I never buy a computer with the idea to even come close to filling up the internal drive. It's just too easy and cheap to have external HDDs for seldom used data and backups of it all.

For us, 500GB is the sweet spot but we no longer work with large audio visual files.