How much storage is needed for steam

[76561199235571792]

Hello just brought a new computer and looking to donwload steam again but I do no think I have enough storage for it. I was wondering if anyone could tell me how much RAM storage is need for it please?

[DarkCrystalMethod]

If you have 8GB of RAM you'll do fine for just about every game(check the steam store page of each game for additional hardware requirements).

[Seretti]

Originally posted by ethanmapp11:

I was wondering if anyone could tell me how much RAM storage is need for it please?

RAM is memory, not storage.

[Haruspex]

There is a lot wrong with this question.

First, storage and RAM are two different things.

Think of storage, or hard drive/ solid state drive space as like a file cabinet under your desk where you hold all your stuff.

RAM is working memory. It's like the surface of the desk itself. You pull files out of your storage file cabinet, which is a bit slow, and put them on your desk, which is lightning fast. Basically instant.

Steam all by itself takes up about 600 megabytes of "storage". (1 MB = about 1 million bytes.) When it's running, it's RAM usage varies depending on what it's doing. Right now on my system, it's reporting about 700 megabytes of RAM is used by Steam.

The games themselves take up their own amount of space. When you download and install a game, it takes up storage space. Really big modern games can be huge at 100+ gigabytes worth of storage. (1 GB = about 1 billion bytes.) Smaller games can vary, and some are downright tiny.

If you have a 100 gigabyte game, this doesn't necessarily mean you need 100 gigabytes of RAM just to run it. It will only load what it needs into RAM, and will purge what it doesn't need as you go. So if you're on level 3 in a game, it will load the data for level 3 into RAM, but the rest of the levels wait in storage until the PC needs it. It can get more complex than this, but that's a simplified version of how it works.

In a modern gaming PC, 16 gigabytes of RAM is sort of the standard, with 32 gigabytes recommended for enthusiasts. For drive storage, there's really no reason not to have a solid state drive these days. These are storage drives with no moving parts, and they're very fast compared to the old style "hard drives" that operate a bit like a multi-tiered record player, with spinning magnetic disks and an arm that seeks across those disks to read and write the information. A typical PC setup might use a 1 terabyte solid state drive for all your stuff, (1 TB = about 1 trillion bytes.) but it's not uncommon to have larger drives, or even multiple drives.

[DarkCrystalMethod]

My dad calls RAM and Memory storage all the time when he really means disk space, which he also calls memory. It annoys me to no end too. I tried to answer the question in this topics body, not the title as it was a clarification for how much of a certain type of storage being inquired about, figuring he already had a handle on the other types that he did not specifically ask for.

If OP visits the store pages for the games he wants to play he will see the distinct types of storage required.