Laptop Hard Drives

[Monkey]

Hello All,

I plan on getting myself an Octane I I I, but I am uncertain on what spec I should have the hard drives. I've not built a pc since 2009, so I'm out of touch with all the new types and interfaces that have arrived since then, so any advice on how you should do it and what you have to look out for. For example, is overheating a problem in a laptop? Should I avoid certain types of drives? Is a m.2 drive worth the extra over the ssd? Are hybrid drives any good? How should you configure them? What's overkill?

I was considering the following:

Super fast 512 gb sm951 in the m.2 slot and a 1 tb hybrid in the regular sata slot.

How would you set it up?

 

[Frank100]

Hi,

M.2 SATA and SSD drives use less power and so that means longer use on battery. It also means less noise and heat, although I wouldn't be overly worried about either of these problems with a mechanical disk.

The Seagate hybrid drive is using older technology so the mechanical disk portion is slower than any of the equivalent 'all' mechanical disks available today. The 8GB of SSD isn't big enough to really make it useful. A few years ago these drives were a good option but I wouldn't recommend them nowadays.

M.2 SATA is quicker than SSD generally speaking but at present Windows doesn't make full use of the performance difference. It will in the not too distant future though. If you can afford it the Samsung M.2 SATA is worth the extra over the Samsung 850 SSD.

If you need a lot of storage space you might consider getting yourself a mini NAS and keep all your music, videos, pictures and other personal files on there. You can then access that from any device in the home and even configure the NAS to be accessible to you outside of the home. I can even stream my movies from my NAS using my mobile phone when I'm away on business. I did buy quite a high end one so best check specs for different options available. Of course you can buy a good amount of cloud storage space but I personally like my own.

In terms of overkill it kind of comes down to budget. The larger the capacity generally speaking the more expensive per GB, although the smallest capacity ones aren't best value either.

A few thoughts to consider.

Frank100

 

[Monkey]

Thanks for the response. You've given me some new things to consider.

I notice that some sata SSD's have the same read/write as most of the m.2's. Is there something else I am missing or are they the same performance? So am I potentially wasting the m.2 slot by not putting the sm951 in there?

 

[mantadog]

The SATA SSD's rated at the same speed as the M.2 SSD's will perform the same, the super fast SSD's will only work in the M.2 slots as they have much higher bandwidth (M.2 uses the PCIe lanes) where the "normal" SSD's use the SATA ports which have a much lower bandwidth. So in short, if you want speed you need to use M.2. if you want cheap (but still nice and quick) use the SATA SSD's