How To Choose The Best Laptop To Fit Your Needs: Part 4 Storage

 

Introduction:   

There is nothing that causes more dread when making a new laptop purchase than the fear of making the wrong choice. With laptops often costing upwards of $1000, it is easy to experience hesitation when buying. This post will hopefully alleviate some of the stress by providing you with some useful information to look out for when making your next big laptop purchase. Since there is too much information to go in depth on in one blog post. Today I will be focusing on storage.

 

Storage: 

Storage is a fairly basic category when it comes to buying a new laptop. It really all comes down to how much you plan on storing on your system. Now, there are two types of storage you will find when you buy a new laptop. Hard drives, and SSDs. A hard drive uses a disk to read and write data. It works similarly to a vinyl record. The disk spins and a head reads data stored on the disk. This makes it slower and more fragile than an SSD; However, they are much more cost effective. An SSD stores data on flash memory, this allows it to write and retrieve data incredibly quickly.

Most new laptops have begun transitioning from large hard drives to smaller SSDs. An inexpensive laptop which may have had a 1 terabyte hard drive (1024GB), would now have a 256GB or even 128GB SSD. Though you can find options for a combination of the two. 

So, which should you pick?

Examples:

1. I am a student who has access to cloud storage through my school. I use my laptop to take notes as well as completing online assignments and essays. In this case, I would buy a laptop with minimal storage. Preferably 256GB, though 128 would suffice. I would  just have to be careful with my storage management.

2. I am a stay at home mom who loves photography. I have thousands of pictures that I want to store on my laptop. In addition to this, I want to be able to keep movies and games on it to entertain my children while traveling. In this case, I would recommend at least a 512GB SSD, or a 1TB hard drive.

In this example there is a large gap between the amount of storage I recommend for an SSD or HDD. This is primarily due to the availability of  smaller HDDs. Many laptop producers don't make laptops with a HDD smaller than a TB anymore. In addition to this, you won't see much of a price difference between a laptop with a 512GB SSD or a 1TB HDD. 

3. I am a working professional who works remotely for a company. In my work, I access a remote desktop. While I have a lot of data to store, it is handled by my companies servers. In this case I would also recommend a 256GB SSD.

Conclusion:

Storage is an important aspect when it comes to a laptop. It may not factor into the cost much until you start looking at larger SSDs, but we all know the pain of having a lot to store and too little space. One thing I highly encourage is looking for a laptop with an expansion slot. Look for the number of M.2 slots available on your laptop. This would allow you to potentially expand the storage on your laptop by just purchasing an additional SSD. While the process can sometimes be a bit complex. I will release a blog post explaining how to do it. I hope this has been helpful in narrowing down the laptop you will purchase. Soon I will begin making lists of my laptop recommendations for various roles. As always, feel free to email me with any questions you may have at blog.techmustang@gmail.com.