I think the faster your connection, the less you can get away with for drive space. At one point, I was living in a place where the absolute fastest available internet was 1.5 meg dsl and where my actual connection speed hovered around dialup levels. I had massive amounts of local storage because I didn’t want to download anything more than once, and nothing was more soul crushing than getting a game on dvd so I didn’t have to worry about downloading it, and then still have to wait while it downloaded gigs worth of patches. Buying a game meant days of downloading, which I’d have to let run while at work because literally nothing else could be happening while a download was occurring. I now have gigabit ethernet.

I moved completely over to a steam deck for pc gaming. I rarely even think about how long a game takes to download, even in the case of a game like BG3 (which is great, btw - it’s a shockingly legit successor to the BG franchise and this is going to be one of those games that people remember for a decade or more).

In any case, I bought a deck with 512G a few months ago, and grabbed a 1tb card for it. I haven’t downloaded my entire library onto it, much less any non-steam games, but I find that the ability to go from thinking about playing a game to playing it in about the time it takes to get and eat a sandwich vastly changes the equation. Non-AAA games download in minutes.

Anyway, upgrading your internet speed may not be something available to everyone, because many places still have crap infrastructure, and some ISPs still have data caps. Mine thankfully doesn’t because I ended up moving so much data downloading to my new deck on top of 4k video streaming that I would be blowing through it monthly.

If you can’t upgrade your speed, upgrade your storage. You can use cheaper external drives with physical platters and either store games on there that don’t throttle on low rate io, or at least store the install files for games that you can then move over to your ssd. Back in the day when a 40mb hdd was considered large, we used to write scripts that would compress and uncompress games on the fly. I think wing commander with the voice pack by itself took up most of my drive.

tl;dr Think about investing in one or a few tb of external storage.