The drawer fronts are the thing nobody checks, and it's the thing that bites you later. A desk with storage looks like one solid piece in a photo, but the drawers are often shallow enough that a laptop charger and a stapler fill the whole box, and then you're back to a pile of papers on top anyway. Still worth having one. A desk that gives you even two decent drawers means your desk surface stays a desk surface, not a landing strip for everything you couldn't be bothered to put away.
Measuring for this is not like measuring for a plain table, because the storage eats into your leg room before it eats into the floor space. Pedestal drawers on one or both sides can leave you perched sideways if you're tall or if your chair has arms, so sit in the chair you actually own and check the gap, not the gap in the showroom. Leave at least a foot of clearance behind the chair for it to push back, more if the room doubles as a hallway or a nook off the living room, which in most real homes it does. The common mistake is buying for the wall it'll live against and forgetting the door swing, the radiator, the plug socket that's six inches too far left. Measure the plug position. I didn't once, and spent a year with a cable strung across the floor like a trip wire for anyone walking the dog through at 6am.
Solid wood storage desks age well, the drawers might stick a little in summer humidity and that's normal, a dab of candle wax on the runners sorts it. Veneer and laminate versions wear at the edges and corners first, especially where a chair knocks against the base every day, so a desk tucked somewhere it won't get clipped will look newer for longer. Wipe spills fast, laptops leak condensation more than people expect, and a swollen drawer bottom is hard to fix once it's happened. These desks suit a spare room doing double duty as an office, a corner of a bedroom, a rental where you need the storage because there's no built in cupboard to lean on. They're less good in a small open plan living space where you want the desk to disappear in the evening, because storage desks don't disappear, they sit there looking like furniture, which is sort of the point.
Before I buy one, I ask myself whether I'm paying for storage I'll actually use, or storage that's just going to become the place where cables go to die.
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