Is a 128 GB SSD still large enough for Windows 10 in 2019?

biggles

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2016 model year MSI laptop with 128 GB nvme SSD, and also a 1 TB mechanical drive for data, games, personal files (music, video, pics, etc). I do store apps like MS Office, Chrome, Audacity on the system drive for fast performance. Should I upgrade to a 512 GB nvme SSD? They are really cheap these days (saw a few today around $60). Also, I keep reading about how Windows 10 is using up more and more storage space over time. And I have heard that bigger SSD's run faster.
 
2016 model year MSI laptop with 128 GB nvme SSD, and also a 1 TB mechanical drive for data, games, personal files (music, video, pics, etc). I do store apps like MS Office, Chrome, Audacity on the system drive for fast performance. Should I upgrade to a 512 GB nvme SSD? They are really cheap these days (saw a few today around $60). Also, I keep reading about how Windows 10 is using up more and more storage space over time. And I have heard that bigger SSD's run faster.
Go for the bigger SSD. You want to give yourself some room for growth. Cheaper/easier than doing that upgrade in 2-3 years.
 
Yes upgrade. With the constant Win 10 updates Inland Pro 512GB drive would be perfect.
 
I haven't really looked recently but in the past the 128 and smaller SSD's had much lower performance than the 256GB and larger SSD's.

I have the latest Windows 10 on this machine with just a few programs and there is still plenty of space.
plex-drives.jpg
 
64GB and over is fine for the OS, the usual apps and allowing the major OS update switcheroo.

MS burned themselves and customers bigtime with those supposed Chromebook beaters with just 32GB of SSD though. Just not big enough to handle the big updates. I get quite a few of those in and all you can do is copy the user data off and rebuild them from scratch with the latest build. Just not enough room to move stuff around. You can use compression but its still not enough.

Disk compression can work fine though...
 
Yes, 128 would work for just the OS, but honestly with prices down as low as they are you're probably better off going with larger. I just swapped out 256gb SSD in my desktop and my daughter's because lack of space, but it was more than just the OS. I also took the opportunity to switch here from data to nvme, 512gb for under $50... Sure it's lower end and can only do 1500MB/s... That's still much better than my Samsung sata drive.
 
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128gb works fine for OS drive i have multiple system running with it.
No games are installed on them ( well a few is but they are very old aka not multi GB games)
 
If you go for NVMe make sure your laptop supports it is my 2c.

I recently added an 500Gb WD blue to my laptop as the mechanical drive was a bit slow to run wow comfortably and the SSD (also an 128 GB one) was so full with just windows and wow that I lacked space for updating the OS. I just added to M.2 SSD to the 2nd slot and copied wow and a couple other games that stream a lot of data to it.
 
For just an OS drive, 128 is fine. I wouldn't recommend it for a personal use system though: a few games or movies will fill it up quick.
I have a VM/fileserver with a 128 drive but there's nothing else but Server 2019 on that drive.
 
You can get a 240GB NVME SSD for about $40 these days... don't buy any less than that. You always want your SSD to have plenty of free space so it doesn't slow down.
 
You can free up a lot of space by turning off some of the windows rollback/restore options. But if you don't mind opening it up and it supports NVMe, cheap upgrade is probably worth it.

If you are fine on overall space could also consider going for a 1TB (or even 2TB) and getting rid of the mechanical completely. Bonus: will lighten the laptop, reduce noise and handle drops better.
 
240GB is more comfortable, but 128GB works fine, especially if you have 8GB RAM.

Remember your page file can easily consume up to what your RAM size is and your hibernate file WILL consume what your RAM size is. So if you have 16GB of RAM, that’s up to 32GB of your 128GB HD used up in the background without anything else installed - and not counting the rest of the OS install footprint. With 32GB of RAM you are taking up to half your hard drive at 64GB is unavailable to you.

If you don’t hibernate, you can turn that function off and save significant HD space.
 
I usually recommend about 100GB for a usable Win 10 system. I used to recommend 60GB, but after most popular software is added, it's too tight, esp with Windows's new requirements patching wise (you need at least 20GB free).

So, 128GB, is certainly livable, but it depends on how much software you plan to install, how much data space you need.
 
Remember your page file can easily consume up to what your RAM size is and your hibernate file WILL consume what your RAM size is. So if you have 16GB of RAM, that’s up to 32GB of your 128GB HD used up

That is a good point about the pagefile + hibernation files for 16+ GB ram systems. I have a 250GB NVMe drive on my laptop (16GB ram) with 1 game installed (SC2) + MS Office + Visual Studio 2017 + Visual Studio 2013 and I got constantly pestered at every boot that I did not have enough free space for a SSD (only a few GB not even enough for windows to download 1903). I eventually fixed the issue by taking the laptop apart and installing a second 512GB NVMe drive.
 
That is a good point about the pagefile + hibernation files for 16+ GB ram systems. I have a 250GB NVMe drive on my laptop (16GB ram) with 1 game installed (SC2) + MS Office + Visual Studio 2017 + Visual Studio 2013 and I got constantly pestered at every boot that I did not have enough free space for a SSD (only a few GB not even enough for windows to download 1903). I eventually fixed the issue by taking the laptop apart and installing a second 512GB NVMe drive.

Same here, the only game I had on it was StarCraft 2 and had to move it. All the extra Visual Studio frameworks and stuff have to be installed on the C drive and add up quickly. Even without games I still only have 20GB left on my 256GB drive now and it's just windows and dev tools.
 
I use a 256 for an OS drive and a 1TB for everything else. Then a few 4tb spinners for media.
 
Still have my OS (Win10) on an older Samsung EVO 120GB SATA SSD and its about half full. I don't put any games on it and the only real large applications i have ARE games so it's perfectly fine.
 
Still have my OS (Win10) on an older Samsung EVO 120GB SATA SSD and its about half full. I don't put any games on it and the only real large applications i have ARE games so it's perfectly fine.

Have an older laptop with an i7 2000-series quad, and it has a 120GB SSD. It's fine for puttering around doing desktop stuff, playing streaming media, and running the occasional low-end game.
 
Thanks for the feedback everyone. I went with this 512 GB one:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07K1HMMJC/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

The Adata ssd's seem like a good bang for the buck buy. Fast performance but cheaper than the Samsungs. I plan to clone the 128 GB nvme ssd to that one after installation. Hopefully that will be easy to do, I have heard cloning can be tricky when the destination drive size does not match the source drive size.
 
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Thanks for the feedback everyone. I went with this 512 GB one:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07K1HMMJC/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

The Adata ssd's seem like a good bang for the buck buy. Fast performance but cheaper than the Samsungs. I plan to clone the 128 GB nvme ssd to that one after installation. Hopefully that will be easy to do, I have heard cloning can be tricky when the destination drive size does not match the source drive size.


Partition Wizard can sort that out usually. I also resize the main partition (during the migrate SSD wizard process) to just 1-2Gb larger than the data allows before doing the clone because it cuts down the copy time. You can then just resize and move after using Partition Wizard or Disk manager in seconds.
 
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Hopefully that will be easy to do, I have heard cloning can be tricky when the destination drive size does not match the source drive size.

Nope, just clone then extend the drive size to max in Disk Management.
 
The Adata website has 2 software tools to do the hard drive cloning. Acronis and Macrium Reflect. Either of these good choices for the job?

Acronis is easy to use but bloated. I use diskcopy, which used to be free from Easeus.
 
The Adata website has 2 software tools to do the hard drive cloning. Acronis and Macrium Reflect. Either of these good choices for the job?
I used Marcium Reflect, the free version worked without issue.
 
Update: installed the Adata SSD into the MSI laptop. Here is the laptop config:
https://us.msi.com/Laptop/GT72S-Dominator-G-6th-Gen-GTX-970M/Specification
The laptop has 4 m.2 slots, 2 sata and 2 nvme. I installed the Adata into the 2nd nvme slot. Is there a way to boot from that drive? I did not see that option in the bios. Maybe I need to swap the 128 GB nvme drive (current boot drive in nvme slot 1) with the newer Adata 512 GB drive in slot 2?

Another question came up during the upgrade. Turns out I had 2 m.2 128 GB SATA drives installed. These were not showing up in Windows explorer. But I checked the invoice from Xoticpc and sure enough these were thrown in as part of a sales promotion at that time. Anyway, using Windows Disk Manager I formatted one of these m.2 SATA drives. The other only shows up in bios. Could this be because the drives were mistakenly configured in Raid-1? How do I turn off Raid entirely? I just want the 2 m.2 sata drives for extra storage space.
 
Practically giving away 120/128GB these days.

They had a bin of these at microcenter, like a real bin, with hundreds of them. Don't even give a shit about theft on these. But yes, still plenty of space for a light to moderate usage computer. If media can be offloaded or not expected on the device.

pRnAkWd.jpg
 
128GB SSDs is still enough for Windows to work. I have never utilized that amount of space.
As for RAID, you should be able to configure it during boot entering configuration menu.
 
64GB and over is fine for the OS, the usual apps and allowing the major OS update switcheroo.

MS burned themselves and customers bigtime with those supposed Chromebook beaters with just 32GB of SSD though. Just not big enough to handle the big updates. I get quite a few of those in and all you can do is copy the user data off and rebuild them from scratch with the latest build. Just not enough room to move stuff around. You can use compression but its still not enough.

Disk compression can work fine though...
ms has added support for usb drives in the update to get around this. if there isn't enough room it will ask for a usb hdd or flash drive to use for file swapping.

op, 60gb and up is fine for 10. I ran with an old ocz 60 for ages.
edit: and I now see you got something...
 
My c:\windows folder is 26GB and c:\Users is 58GB. I'm going to go out on a limb and say no 128GB isn't big enough for Windows anymore.
 
My c:\windows folder is 26GB and c:\Users is 58GB. I'm going to go out on a limb and say no 128GB isn't big enough for Windows anymore.
those depend on the user(s) and how clean you keep things. mine are 18GB and 11GB and I haven't done a cleanup in a while.
 
is ti big enough for windows. yes
is it big enough for windows and peoples trash data: depends on the person
 
I should probably do some disk cleaning up lol. Still, what is the price difference between 128GB and 256GB? $10? $15?
 
120 is only big enough if you have another drive for other stuff or you only need windows + office. I wouldn't buy less than 240 anymore for anyone though, even grandparents.
 
I should probably do some disk cleaning up lol. Still, what is the price difference between 128GB and 256GB? $10? $15?

Here in AU, (which generally has inflated hardware prices even after tax+conversion) a 120GB sata SSD is $35, and a 240GB is $45. It's a no-brainer.
 
Do many folks here move the mydocs items (pictures, music, videos, documents, downloads, etc) to the mechanical drive? By default Windows puts them on the system drive. Lately I have been experimenting with putting these on the larger mechanical drive. Besides saving precious ssd space, it makes Windows reinstalls easier. Since personal docs are not stored on the OS drive they are untouched with the reinstall.
 
Do many folks here move the mydocs items (pictures, music, videos, documents, downloads, etc) to the mechanical drive? By default Windows puts them on the system drive. Lately I have been experimenting with putting these on the larger mechanical drive. Besides saving precious ssd space, it makes Windows reinstalls easier. Since personal docs are not stored on the OS drive they are untouched with the reinstall.
you should have been doing this for years, I have. even with just hdds id have all data on a second drive.
 
Do many folks here move the mydocs items (pictures, music, videos, documents, downloads, etc) to the mechanical drive? By default Windows puts them on the system drive. Lately I have been experimenting with putting these on the larger mechanical drive. Besides saving precious ssd space, it makes Windows reinstalls easier. Since personal docs are not stored on the OS drive they are untouched with the reinstall.

That's best practice and standard procedure for systems that I sell.
 
I use a 256 for an OS drive and a 1TB for everything else. Then a few 4tb spinners for media.
I use a 1 TB SSD that has a 512 GB Windows/programs partition, a 128 GB general DATA partition, and 128 GB for media that I access a lot. Most of my media and my stored downloads, they go on a separate 4 TB HDD. The way SSD prices are trending, I may replace that HDD with an SSD in a year or two.
 
128GB system disk is more than enough. But if you are going to play games, I would recommend at least 512 SATA SDD.
 
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