Windows 11 requires a hard drive with at least 64 GB of space in order to be installed. But how much storage space does it really have to be free to download and install Windows 11? And how much storage space does the operating system actually take up after installation? We’ll show you here.
Size as an upgrade from Windows 10
We first updated a new Windows 10 with all updates and then carried out the disk cleanup to purify the hard drive as much as possible. Windows Explorer then indicated a storage space usage of 19.7 GB. The space required for Windows 11 installation is more than it’s previous OS.
After we installed Windows 11 as an upgrade (Insider Preview Version 21H2 Build 22000.51), around 21 GB more were used. This means that the hard drive was now occupied with a total of around 41 GB. After we had performed the disk cleanup and had also deleted old Windows installation files that are necessary for restoring Windows 10, we saw the end result: Windows 11, as an upgrade, took up around 19.7 GB of storage space.
Space required for Windows 11 installation
We also set up the leaked Windows 11 version (Dev OS Build 21996.1) as a new installation. After cleaning up the disk, Windows Explorer showed us that Windows 11 is using around 17.4 GB. For Microsoft’s latest operating system, that’s amazingly slim.
Conclusion – how much space should be free for the upgrade?
- Before Windows 11, our Windows 10 took up almost 20 GB on the hard drive.
- After installing Windows 11, a total of 41 GB was used.
- That said, Windows 11 took about 21 GB more to install.
- After we had deleted the old Windows installation data from Windows 10 with the disk cleanup, only just under 20 GB were occupied on the hard disk again.
The new operating system does not seem to install much ballast. The almost 21 GB of additional storage space used is due to the old Windows 10, which Windows 11 still backs up for a possible recovery. So the space required for Windows 11 installation is around 64 GB.