The dynamic range of holographic storage media is traditionally characterized in terms of M/#. However, this is a system parameter that assumes simple, uniform plane-wave holograms. Realistic architectures violate this assumption so that M/# measured with plane waves cannot be used to predict system diffraction efficiency. Thus, there currently is no systematic method predicting signal strength and medium consumption for holographic storage architectures a priori. We define a new material parameter, the modulation integral, M(I), and show how this may be used for dynamic range budgeting and diffraction efficiency prediction in complex storage systems. The method is illustrated by applying it to two architectures, collinear and angle polytopic, in order to estimate the M/# required for achieving a target storage density in the presence of empirical optical scatter noise.