SSD or HDD for laptop? Decisions decisions

M

Maddnotez

Limp Gawd
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I can't stand HDDs in laptops anymore. IF you absolutely must have an absurd amount of storage on a laptop, then you can always opt for:

1. SSHDD (HDD with SSD cache) - usually not much better than a HDD since the HDD part is pretty much always a sad 5400rpm.
2. Laptop that can take 2 drives - One 2.5" and another mSata or nVME or m.2 for an SSD.

Another good thing about having an SSD in a laptop is that it can help the battery life a decent amount as SSDs use quite a bit less power than HDDs.
 
Oh god... please don't use a standard HDD as the primary drive. Get an SSD for OS and programs, and a secondary or external drive for her mass storage needs.

Using HDDs as primary OS drives needs to die in 2017.
 
Darkswordz said:
Oh god... please don't use a standard HDD as the primary drive. Get an SSD for OS and programs, and a secondary or external drive for her mass storage needs.

Using HDDs as primary OS drives needs to die in 2017.
Click to expand...

It actually needed to die about 5 years ago.
 
The one with an i7-6500u is faster and cheaper than the one with an i5-5200U, plus it has a M.2 SSD. I'm not a big fan of consumer HP laptops, so don't take that as an endorsement. :p
 
If you really care about and really love your wife, don't buy a consumer laptop, period - that means no Dell Inspirons, no HP Pavilions, no Lenovo Edge, no Samsung, no Asus, no Toshiba (oh hell no), and so on. :)

Protip: if you can buy it in a store like Best Buy, it's a consumer laptop - if you have to order it online direct from the manufacturer (more often than not), it's a business class. Business class hardware comes with better warranties by default as well - in fact many Dell Latitudes come with CompleteCare which provides on-site service meaning they'll come to your home/etc to fix/repair/replace the device when required which is damned awesome, I think HP has something like that but charges additional fees for it, I don't think Lenovo offers that kind of support at any price.

Get her a used Dell Latitude in the 7xxx series, an HP Elitebook or Spectre, or even a ThinkPad (and I mean a ThinkPad as in the X, T, or W series not anything else from Lenovo), give it plenty of RAM (4GB min is just where it starts anymore), and then get an SSD in it unless she requires a metric fuckton of raw storage for some reason.

Seriously, consumer "pretty shiny plastic" laptops should be avoided at all possible costs but you can get some rather tremendous deals on used business class machines in excellent condition if you're willing to do a little research. Or you can cheap/chimp out and get a consumer model at Best Buy or Amazon, it's up to you.

Personally the only thing I really want to do with consumer laptops is shoot 'em from long distances with a high powered deadly accurate rifle. :D
 
Tiberian said:
If you really care about and really love your wife, don't buy a consumer laptop, period - that means no Dell Inspirons, no HP Pavilions, no Lenovo Edge, no Samsung, no Asus, no Toshiba (oh hell no), and so on. :)

Protip: if you can buy it in a store like Best Buy, it's a consumer laptop - if you have to order it online direct from the manufacturer (more often than not), it's a business class. Business class hardware comes with better warranties by default as well - in fact many Dell Latitudes come with CompleteCare which provides on-site service meaning they'll come to your home/etc to fix/repair/replace the device when required which is damned awesome, I think HP has something like that but charges additional fees for it, I don't think Lenovo offers that kind of support at any price.

Get her a used Dell Latitude in the 7xxx series, an HP Elitebook or Spectre, or even a ThinkPad (and I mean a ThinkPad as in the X, T, or W series not anything else from Lenovo), give it plenty of RAM (4GB min is just where it starts anymore), and then get an SSD in it unless she requires a metric fuckton of raw storage for some reason.

Seriously, consumer "pretty shiny plastic" laptops should be avoided at all possible costs but you can get some rather tremendous deals on used business class machines in excellent condition if you're willing to do a little research. Or you can cheap/chimp out and get a consumer model at Best Buy or Amazon, it's up to you.

Personally the only thing I really want to do with consumer laptops is shoot 'em from long distances with a high powered deadly accurate rifle. :D
Click to expand...

Appreciate the advice.

The thing is I have $300 in points through my work. I will double check but Amazon and Best Buy are the only options from places that sell PC's. Meaning I have to cash points in from work and these retailers are the only one's participating.

With that said I did decide to go with an SSD. Not too knowledgeable on the M.2 SSD but with our options, a consumer grade is what we have to get. Unless Amazon is selling something else?

I was actually planning on making the purchase this weekend after payday. Still browsing until then.
 
I could not get an SSD to work in my laptop. Totally unstable. Went back to my HDD and all is well. Read some stuff about using IDE vs AHCI but didn't try it. This was trying both Win 10 and Win 7.

Is there some trick I'm missing?
 
Years ago there was an issue with Vista and some SSDs from Seagate iirc (I could be and probably am wrong on that) and a specific chipset as part of the problem but I haven't heard of any major widespread compatibility issues with SSDs in many years now, perhaps the SSD you purchased was just defective from the factory which does happen more often than people realize. I'm not sure what you consider "stable" or how you define it but an SSD works just like a hard drive does, it's just faster in operation and figuring out what might have gone wrong after the fact is somewhat pointless. :)
 
Maddnotez said:
Appreciate the advice.

The thing is I have $300 in points through my work. I will double check but Amazon and Best Buy are the only options from places that sell PC's. Meaning I have to cash points in from work and these retailers are the only one's participating.

With that said I did decide to go with an SSD. Not too knowledgeable on the M.2 SSD but with our options, a consumer grade is what we have to get. Unless Amazon is selling something else?

I was actually planning on making the purchase this weekend after payday. Still browsing until then.
Click to expand...
You need to be careful and put in some extra research but Amazon has a lot of refurbished business class laptops that have come off lease. That is assuming your credit works on the marketplace and not direct from amazon.
 
Tiberian said:
Years ago there was an issue with Vista and some SSDs from Seagate iirc (I could be and probably am wrong on that) and a specific chipset as part of the problem but I haven't heard of any major widespread compatibility issues with SSDs in many years now, perhaps the SSD you purchased was just defective from the factory which does happen more often than people realize. I'm not sure what you consider "stable" or how you define it but an SSD works just like a hard drive does, it's just faster in operation and figuring out what might have gone wrong after the fact is somewhat pointless. :)
Click to expand...
By unstable, I mean COMPLETELY fucking unstable.

Would freeze almost instantly upon boot and getting into windows. I believe the mouse would still move around but do nothing and everything was frozen. Took a hard boot, pulling the battery, to get out and try again. Finally gave up and put old HDD back in. Been working flawlessly. So SOMETHING was up with the SSD. Haven't put the SSD into another rig to test yet though. Mushkin Triactor I think. This was on an ASUS Core i5 w/ 8g ram. Decent specs, but maybe 5+ yrs old.
 
Mushkin has been junk for SSDs, from my experience. I will not put anything with a Sandforce chipset in a computer I give a damn about. We had some PNY, 240GB that Dell gave us when they couldn't get us their 120s soon enough. Every single one of them failed. This last one, they replaced the 240 with a 480GB XLR8 model, and it's sitting in a box, because I refuse to put it in a computer I'm going to give to someone else. I'll use it to host virtual machines on my test system, because when it dies, I won't care.
 
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