NFT: Laptop question (SSD vs regular hard drive)

And so are a lot faster than hard drives as no
platters have to spin to get data. Problem with SSDs is their cost va that of a classic hard drive. 128 GB may be small if she's going to be storing a lot of data. The operating system takes up a chunk of that. I have a 128 gab SSD for the OS and use a 1tb HD for data and program installs that are going to take up a lot of space.

pretty much everything will be faster. That is a very small SSD, however.

What does she do with the PC? She may need more room than that.

CPU and RAM is overblown unless the computer will be doing some serious multitasking or running large applications that require intensive use of memory and the processor. But you will notice the SSD performance improvement in many aspects of day to day use like powering up/down the machine and opening applications. I highly recommend an SSD machine the price is starting to come down and become reasonable for them.

If 128 GB is not enough space you could buy a cheap external drive (and there are some nicer more expensive ones that connect on the network so its easy to access from multiple devices in the house) and you can use that as a backup if 128 GB is too few.

And if there is any space issues just get an external drive. They are very cheap at this point. She can use that for photos music, etc which is the usual stuff home users have that actually takes up space.

She's mainly using it for work for office, word documents PDFs that sort of thing. I figured an extra large I would give her more room if need be. She will not be storing music or photos on it so I don't think she should eat a huge amount of memory.

for more storage.

the harddrives (which is really easy) you can save yourself money and get more storage by buying the regular hard drive and then seperately buying the SSD from elsewhere. SSD drives are regularly on sale for 250GB for around $80.

Either way, SSD is the way to go, dramatic speed increase in OS and applications.

then you should have no problem with a 500gb HDD. Everything is in the cloud now and lots of people have external HDDs, high capacity USBs and home servers, so 128gb is plenty. That's also why HDDs are so cheap. Fwiw, you could probably buy a new 1TB, install it, throw away the 500gb and still come out ahead...(i forgot the price differences between the new machines, but if it's more than 50-60...)

you could get by with only 128 GB. That's really small.

every way, and more expensive as a result, PCs and operating systems and HDDs now all work very nicely and very fast together that if you're on a budget, you wouldn't miss the SSD at all.
The biggest benefit to an SSD IMO is that it has no moving parts, so it is less likely to break if you drop your laptop.

screwed with the SSD. Its not like the HDD where you can buy a new replacement. The SSD is integrated into the motherboard.

In comment 13007561 PatersonPlank said:

Quote:

screwed with the SSD. Its not like the HDD where you can buy a new replacement. The SSD is integrated into the motherboard.

Usually in "ultrabooks" this is the case. But in "normal" laptops, you can swap them out the same way.

In comment 13007561 PatersonPlank said:

Quote:

screwed with the SSD. Its not like the HDD where you can buy a new replacement. The SSD is integrated into the motherboard.

Interesting, it isn't on my Asus. Further, if he purchased a laptop with a conventional drive he can very easily (as noted above) replace it with an SSD. I know of no laptop that has the drive integrated with the motherboard.

instead of the traditional 2.5". The full specs should note that. I have an ASUS transformer tablet/notebook that is precisely that. But that's got the detachable keyboard and stuff and they use the card based SSD for size reasons.

thanks.

My laptop is my first ssd. I will never use a regular hdd again. The difference in boot times is very large. Performance is better as well. You don't realize howany times you need to just turn on your computer to check something. For me it's a few seconds and I am ready.

My SSD can be swaped out. You just have to make sure it has a compatible connection. Some work some don't.

On the flip side storage is an issue. But you can get an external drive or use cloud storage. We are probably all headed in that direction anyway. Some laptops have hybrid SSD plus hdd to mitigate the storage issues while running programs from the SSD. But that might be overkill. Good luck!