Advice regarding new laptop with HDD & SDD combined

[spethy31]

I have been considering buying this Acer Aspire F 17 Notebook | F5-771 laptop that includes a 1TB HDD and a 128GB SSD.

https/uk-store.acer.com/aspire-f-17-notebook-f5-771-black

After discussion with Acer online, it seems that the operating system is installed on the 128GB which seems like a good thing in terms of speed....but the operative implied that Windows updates in the future may exceed the space on the SSD and may need an external USB or hard drive to be connected.

What are people's thoughts on this? Do you think 128GB is sufficient for a combined SSD system or shall I stick with a traditional 1TB HDD system and save my money...?

We are home users that need a new laptop for surfing, photo editing, music etc and don't do any gaming.

Thanks

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there spethy31,

I believe that 128 GB would be just enough for your OS, and several heavy/intensive applications and/or games.
You will not really need to attach any external HDDs or flash drives.

Just make sure that you save all other data like videos, music, pics, etc. on your 1 TB HDD.

Let me know in case you have some more questions,
D_Know_WD

 

[mcnumpty23]

yes 128gb should be doable

and a laptop really benefits from a ssd

it will boot much faster for one thing if anything boot time will see a bigger boost than an ssd on a desktop does

i assume this is because a laptop has a simpler bios and less things to check during boot

would absolutely say get the ssd over a mechanical drive

 

[dudeman509]

Limit Windows restore points from gobbling up your disk space, and do a disk cleanup and proper management of where applications are installed and you should be just fine with 128 for a system drive.

 

[grmnlxndr]

It is enough.
If you need to free some more space, move the paging file and hibernation file to the 1TB drive. Install only most used applications on SSD, and make sure all documents and other data to be stored in the HDD.
Regards.

 

[spethy31]

Thanks for all the replies and useful tips - I thought that an SSD would be the way to go but needed some reassurance after the slightly conflicting information from the Acer representative!

 

[jaguarskx]

Generally speaking, a 128GB SSD is enough storage space for Windows 10. The OS uses around 20GB or less, but that can grow a little bit over time due to updates.

One thing that I do is I disable Windows restore points. Restore points basically makes a partial image of your C: drive so that you can potentially restore Windows if becomes corrupted. Alternatively, you can adjust the slider so that Windows limits how much of the SSD it will use to make periodic restore points; for example 10% of the SSD's capacity. Old restore points will be deleted if Windows runs out space for restore points.


http/www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-use-windows-10s-system-restore-as-a-recovery-tool/


Another thing I do is about every 3 months I run Disk Cleanup to delete any system files from updates that are still lingering on my drive.


http/www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-clean-up-system-files-with-the-windows-10-disk-cleanup-tool/


A good utility that I use to help delete temporary files and also clean up unused / excess Windows Registry entries is CCleaner. It usually ask if you want to make a backup of the Registry entries you want to delete, but I always click "No". I haven't had a problem using CCleaner for the past 10 or so years.

https/www.piriform.com/ccleaner

 

[jaguarskx]

Also, the good news the capacity of SSDs continues to slowly grow as the technology matures and new manufacturing processes are developed. Also, prices continues to gradually decrease.

Your 128GB SSD is m.2 SATA. It is basically shaped like a stick of gum and it should means 22mm wide x 80mm long. These type of SSDs typically have "2280" as part of the description to indicate the SSD's physical size.

The current max capacity of m.2 SATA SSDs is 1TB, but 2TB versions are coming next year. Just be aware that SSDs are still more expensive than hard drives (HDD). A SSD typically costs around $0.30 - $0.35 per GB; though very high capacity and very fast SSDs can cost around $0.50 per GB. HDD costs around $0.06 - $0.10 per GB.