Phantom Blade Zero shipped on Steam on 28 October 2026 with one line in its system requirements that decides more PC upgrade arguments than any GPUGPU. Graphics Processing Unit — the chip that renders the game's visuals; the main driver of framerate and image quality. tier list: 145 GB available space, and an SSD installation required. That same week, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 asked for 115 GB. The largest figure in the set is Crimson Desert Enhanced’s 180 GB, shipped on 19 March 2026. Those are the publishers’ own numbers, on their own store pages, and they are the only install-size figures this article will use.
What this covers: the storage footprint of the 2026 release slate, read straight off twelve Steam store pages; Valve’s own September 2026 survey of how much free space machines actually have; the arithmetic for budgeting a drive per game; and what a drive costs today. Why it matters: our other storage pieces answered should I buy a drive and does a faster bus help. Neither answers the question you face at the download screen — whether the game fits, and how many of them do — and that question is now decided by capacity, not bandwidth. Who should care: anyone with a 1 TB drive and two large games installed, and anyone buying a drive in a market where a premium 2 TB SSD costs about $400.
The existing pieces in this cluster own their territory and this one does not repeat them: the NAND-squeeze price analysis covers why drives got expensive, the PCIe 5.0 benchmark breakdown covers whether the bus changes frame rate, and the DRAM-less comparison covers the controller. None of them counts gigabytes per game. That is the job here.
What 2026 releases actually ask for
Every figure below is the storage line printed in that game’s own Steam requirements, with the date the page gives for release. Nothing here comes from an aggregator, a “leaked requirements” list, or a size quoted in a trailer.
| Title | Store release date | Free space required | Media wording |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crimson Desert Enhanced | 19 Mar 2026 | 180 GB | “SSD required.” |
| DEATH STRANDING 2: ON THE BEACH | 19 Mar 2026 | 150 GB | “SSD Required” |
| Phantom Blade Zero | 28 Oct 2026 | 145 GB | “SSD installation required.” |
| Nioh 3 | 5 Feb 2026 | 125 GB | “SSD is required.” |
| Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 | 22 Oct 2026 | 115 GB | “SSD with 115 GB available space at launch.” |
| 007 First Light | 26 May 2026 | 80 GB | “SSD required” |
| The Blood of Dawnwalker | 2 Sep 2026 | 60 GB | “Storage on SSD” |
| Subnautica 2 | 14 May 2026 | 50 GB | no SSD wording |
| Onimusha: Way of the Sword | 3 Sep 2026 | 50 GB | “An SSD is required.” |
| DRAGON QUEST VII Reimagined | 5 Feb 2026 | 15 GB | no SSD wording |
| Resident Evil Requiem | 26 Feb 2026 | not published | “An SSD is required.” |
| Fable (pre-purchase) | 23 Feb 2027 | 135 GB | “SSD required” |
Two details in that table do more work than the numbers.
The first is the word available. Every line reads “145 GB available space”, not “145 GB installed”. The publisher is telling you what the drive must have free before the install begins — the right instruction for a buyer and the wrong number to use as a folder size. If your drive shows 150 GB free and the game asks for 145 GB, you are inside the margin, not comfortably past it.
The second is the qualifier on the Call of Duty figure: at launch. That is Activision saying the number is a floor. The previous entry in the series, Black Ops 7, lists “SSD with 161 GB available space at launch” on a page dated 21 November 2025. Two Call of Duty titles eleven months apart, 115 GB and 161 GB, both labelled launch figures.
Take the ten dated 2026 releases with a published figure and the median lands at 97.5 GB (arithmetic on the column above: 15, 50, 50, 60, 80, 115, 125, 145, 150, 180). Half the slate is at or above 115 GB. Three titles sit at or above 145 GB. Resident Evil Requiem is the awkward case: Capcom’s page requires an SSD and publishes no storage figure at all, so anyone quoting a size for it is guessing.
Valve’s own numbers on how much room is left
The installed-size column only matters against the free-space column, and Valve publishes that every month. Its September 2026 hardware survey asks participating machines how much hard-drive space is free, and the answer distribution is the most useful single table for this topic on the internet.
| Free space reported (Sept 2026) | Share of surveyed machines | Change on month |
|---|---|---|
| Less than 10 GB | 0.76% | −0.12 |
| 10 GB to 99 GB | 14.37% | −1.55 |
| 100 GB to 249 GB | 22.03% | −1.95 |
| 250 GB to 499 GB | 21.94% | −1.07 |
| 500 GB to 749 GB | 10.80% | −0.27 |
| 750 GB to 999 GB | 8.29% | −0.43 |
| 1 TB to 2 TB | 9.59% | +0.34 |
| 2 TB to 3 TB | 2.81% | +0.50 |
| 3 TB to 4 TB | 2.11% | +0.47 |
| Above 4 TB | 7.28% | +4.06 |
Add the first three rows and 37.16% of surveyed machines had under 250 GB free in September 2026 (arithmetic on Valve’s published shares). That is not enough room for two 145 GB titles.
Add the first two rows and 15.13% had under 100 GB free. For that group Phantom Blade Zero cannot be installed at all — not “runs poorly”, not “streams badly”, but refuses, because the requirement is 145 GB of free space. That is the concrete form the storage crunch takes in 2026, and it covers a larger population than the number of people who own a PCIe 5.0 drive.
Total capacity is a different distribution: 53.30% of the same survey reported more than 1 TB of total drive space, up 3.79 points on the month, while 22.71% sit in the 750–999 GB bucket. A machine can have a 2 TB drive and 60 GB free — which is what a library of three 145 GB games does to it — so capacity and headroom have to be budgeted separately. The fastest-growing free-space bucket is “above 4 TB”, up 4.06 points: the people solving this problem are solving it with capacity.
Budgeting a drive per game
The arithmetic is boring and that is why it works. A “1 TB” drive shows about 931 GB in Windows (unit arithmetic, not a store claim), and the practical ceiling sits below that because a full drive has its own problems. Take 90% as the working ceiling and 145 GB as the modal big-2026 title.
| Drive | Shown in Windows | Usable at a 90% ceiling | 145 GB installs | 180 GB installs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 TB | ~931 GB | ~838 GB | 5 | 4 |
| 2 TB | ~1,862 GB | ~1,676 GB | 11 | 9 |
| 4 TB | ~3,725 GB | ~3,352 GB | 23 | 18 |
Read the first row honestly: a 1 TB drive holds four of the biggest 2026 releases and then has no room for a patch or next month’s release. That is the machine described by the 22.71% of Steam respondents in the 750–999 GB total-capacity bucket.
Why hold back 10%? LTT Labs ran the experiment in October 2026 on four drives — a DRAM-less WD Blue SN580 1 TB, two Corsair MP600s and a Crucial T705 Gen5 — filling them from a ~450 GB baseline to 60, 80, 90, 95 and 100% and re-running Cyberpunk 2077, F1 24, Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered and the FFXIV Dawntrail load test at each step. Framerateframerate. How many images (frames) the game shows per second; higher = smoother motion. 60 fps is a common target. did not move: “our testing shows that gaming with a full SSD won’t significantly harm your framerate. Either on average, or at 1% lows.” FFXIV scene loads degraded by less than 10% at their worst, and the clearest effect was on the 1 TB drives, where staying below 50% full was worth nearly 10% on load.
The reason to keep headroom is what happens at the end of the range. At 100% full, LTT Labs hit programs that refused to launch, and Photoshop raised warnings about instability. Their drive list also explains why the ceiling moves: LTT records SLC write-cache sizes, sourced from TechPowerUp, of 341 GB (SN580 1 TB), 370 GB (MP600 1 TB), 666 GB (MP600 2 TB) and 220 GB (T705 2 TB). Cache is carved out of empty space, so filling past roughly half the drive forces the controller to convert pseudo-SLC cells back to dense TLC — the mechanism behind the “don’t fill it past 50%” advice. It affects large writes, so it shows up when you install or patch, not when you play.
That gives the budgeting rule: size the drive for your library at 90% fill, and keep a separate margin equal to the largest game you expect to install. The Call of Duty “at launch” wording is the warning label on that margin.
Where DirectStorage fits, and where it does not
The one API that connects compression, install footprint and load speed in 2026 is Microsoft’s DirectStorage, and its own repository states the link plainly. Games, the README says, “choose to store their assets compressed on disk in order to reduce the install footprint, with these assets being decompressed on the fly as load time”, and DirectStorage exists to make that decompression cheap: it is “intended to allow games to make full use of high-speed storage (such as NVMe SSDs) that can deliver multiple gigabytes a second of small (for example, 64kb) data reads with minimal CPU overhead”.
Read that as a purchasing instruction and it says something specific: publishers compress harder to keep the download smaller, then rely on the storage pipeline to unpack it fast. The store-page size is the output of that trade, and the hardware it assumes is an NVMe drive, not a particular generation of one.
Two facts keep this from being over-read. Microsoft’s Win32 portal page — the entry point most people land on — carries a “Last updated on 2022-09-22” stamp, so it is not where to look for the current state of the API. The repository is: microsoft/DirectStorage took commits on 28 October 2026, including work on the zstdgpu path and a change that errors out when a batch’s total uncompressed size exceeds 1 GB — Zstandard plumbing maintained in public, one day before this piece was written.
What none of these store pages say is “DirectStorage”. Searching each for the term returns nothing, while every page that mentions storage media says SSD and most print a gigabyte figure. Our DirectStorage adoption survey maps which titles use it.
The drive to buy at today’s prices
Prices below were read on 30 October 2026 (UTC) from the price widget on Tom’s Hardware’s Best SSDs page, cross-checked against MemRadar’s tracker, whose index was last computed the same day. They are spot prices, not forecasts.
| Drive | Capacity | Price read | Per TB (arithmetic) | Corroboration |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Samsung 990 Pro | 2 TB | $406.39 | ~$203 | MemRadar’s September index put 990 Pro 2 TB listings at $389.00–$414.18 |
| Samsung 990 Pro | 4 TB | $799.90 (list $1,099.99) | ~$200 | same line, same per-TB level |
| Fikwot FN960 (Gen4) | 4 TB | $529.99 (all-time low $401.39) | ~$132 | MemRadar’s “closest to all-time low” list |
The two Samsung rows agree with each other and with an independent tracker, which is why they anchor the section: roughly $200 per terabyte for a premium line, or $0.20 per gigabyte. At that level a 145 GB title occupies about $29 of drive (arithmetic), and a 2 TB drive holding eleven of them costs about $37 per game.
The cheap end moves a lot more than the median. Tom’s own deal widget on the same page listed a Lexar NM1090 Pro 4 TB at $359.79, down from $494.99, and a WD_Black SN7100 2 TB at $149.99 — both well under the medians above — while that article’s prose still quotes a “$156 price on Amazon for the 2TB model” of the SN850X that its widget prices at $267.99. That is the reason to treat a single listing as a spot price and the per-terabyte median as the market. MemRadar’s segment medians show the same stickiness: NVMe up 4.9% on the month, 11.6% over three months, 138.6% over a year at the 30 October computation. (Our October price piece quoted the same tracker’s 14 October medians — +8.4%, +13.9% and +142.2%. A live tracker recomputes; the two snapshots differ by a fortnight and a few points.)
The conclusion from the price data and the footprint data together is unusually clean. Generation is not the constraint: no store page in this set names a bandwidth figure, they name an SSD and a capacity. Capacity is: five 145 GB installs fill a 1 TB drive, and 37.16% of Steam machines did not have 250 GB free to start with. So buy the largest Gen4 drive the budget allows rather than a smaller Gen5 one — capacity converts into installed games, and the extra sequential bandwidth does not convert into frames, as our 11-title PCIe 5.0 benchmark run measured. If the drive will take a lot of installs and patches, the cache question is worth the premium; our DRAM-less versus DRAM comparison puts that gap at 8–11% on a large verify workload and 38% on a 123 GB copy.
What is unconfirmed here
- Store requirements are not installed sizes. No publisher in this set publishes a post-install folder size. Every figure above is the store page’s own wording, not a measurement. Resident Evil Requiem publishes none at all.
- Sizes change. Only the Call of Duty pages say so out loud, with “at launch”. Assume the rest move in the direction of larger.
- This is the PC storefront view. Console install sizes were not checked for this piece.
- Prices are spot prices from 30 October 2026, and the two retail sources disagree on individual SKUs by a wide margin. The per-terabyte medians are the load-bearing number.