What size hard drives for Win 11 PC's?

[kennysarmy]

Good morning,

What size hard drives are people putting in Windows 11 PC's these days?

 

We've been on 240/250 Gb for years but finding that with multiple users logging on to devices the APPDATA folders are getting large and requiring us to intervene and remove local profiles on a regular basis.

 

Considering HDD's of 500Gb for my next batch - is this the norm these days?

 

[3s-gtech]

512GB on new, but plenty on 256GB and not causing issues. I do use GP to delete older profiles though.

 

120GB on very few, but that also works okay here. 64GB, the first ones we bought back in 2012, are still popping up in places but only in service/kiosk machines now.

[psydii]

128Gb works if you are using the share-pc policy in Intune.

256Gb works if you don't use Teams locally (actually I might need to check how Windows 11 handles teams updates these days), and have OneDrive running from an machine wide installer, and you don't mind running a script to remove profiles fairly regularly.

512Gb allows you not to worry about anything (so far)

 

512Gb has been our standard  for desktops or 'desktop-class' laptops since we got back from lock-down. For devices you might describe as netbook/chromebook-like, 128Gb and the SharedPC profile seem to be just fine.

 

 

[FN-GM]

Due to the amount of local data cached by OneDrive, Outlook etc. 512GB

[synaesthesia]

128GB for students, 256 for staff, although don't buy anything under 256 these days. Doesn't hurt anything, profiles are cleared out on logoff for students and staff local profiles don't build much up - google file stream is set to live only.

[Olliedawg]

We run 256GB, but we regularly have to clear profiles out. We use the desktop Teams, onedrive etc.. 

 

Going for 512GB in the future

[StephenPink]

Yep always around the 500GB here - allows for OneDrive caching etc, plus big old Adobe CC apps

[kennysarmy]

On 21/10/2025 at 13:12, Olliedawg said:

We run 256GB, but we regularly have to clear profiles out. We use the desktop Teams, onedrive etc.. 

 

Going for 512GB in the future

 

Have you ever had any luck with Group Policy settings to prune profiles over than X days or found a way to automate powershell scripts to remove older profiles in the background when the PC is in use?

[Olliedawg]

8 minutes ago, kennysarmy said:

 

Have you ever had any luck with Group Policy settings to prune profiles over than X days or found a way to automate powershell scripts to remove older profiles in the background when the PC is in use?

I haven't, no.

 

I've tried the built in GPO, it just doesn't work for us.

 

I use Delprof2 as and when needed which seems to do the trick. Usually do it every half term.

[kennysarmy]

Just now, Olliedawg said:

I haven't, no.

 

I've tried the built in GPO, it just doesn't work for us.

 

I use Delprof2 as and when needed which seems to do the trick. Usually do it every half term.

 

Just been reading that unless you remove all the profiles first then the GPO method won't work as the timer starts from the new profile being created.

I might remove the profiles in a room next week and try the GPO on a 10 day delete window and see if it works.

 

We use the following Powershell Script to remove profiles: as you can specify an ignore list

 

$ErrorActionPreference= 'silentlycontinue'
$Users = Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_UserProfile
$IgnoreList = "helpdesk", "administrator", "Default"

:OuterLoop
foreach ($User in $Users) {
    foreach ($name in $IgnoreList) {
        if ($User.localpath -like "*\$name") {
            continue OuterLoop
        }
    }

    $User.Delete()
}

 

[Fazza]

500+ NVMe on all our computers.  When a typical solid state drive goes over 50% capacity it starts to slow down so we find with a 512GB SSD/NVMe we get the best size and the best speed.

[k-strider]

we used to get 256 now we just by 500.  i don't find the gpo to remove profiles or delprof2 works reliably anymore... so our IT tech now just re images the IT rooms every year or two to keep things cleaner.

 

the cost difference is less than the hassle of dealing with smaller drives on a day to day basis so 500/512 all day for an IT room...

 

we have seating plans in our classrooms which probably helps too...

[Roberto]

We tend to flip between 512 and 256 depending on what our vendor has in stock of our model but then we're a business with 1:1 allocation of devices, not a school with shared use.

 

256Gb is a bit tight for us with some users' software needs and profiles tbh, so I'd be wary of that size for shared use.

[machy]

Have a mix of 256 & 512 here

 

RE the Profile remove GPO, it seems to work ok here unless the students move around alot.

We have it Set as 1 day in some rooms, but have found the timer resets every time X User logs in. So you if you have weekly delete and the same kids sit at the same PC every lesson, its never going to clear. 

[Davit2005]

Depending on what apps you have installed (and have them setup) could greatly increase profile size. General use i.e. office/admin use you won't generally have an issue.

[drutt]

128 - 256 depending.

 

We rarely have to do anything with profiles, we use Cloud Drive Mapper for linking to OneDrive. Staff have only ever had 5GB disk quota and students 1GB. If someone fills up their storage we push them to use the cloud.