Laptop storage speeds have improved significantly in the past few years, mostly due to decreasing costs of modern solid-state drives (SSD). However, for price considerations the majority of laptops continue employ classic hard disks (HDD) despite being significantly slower.
A typical laptop HDD
Solid-state drives and hard disks are fundamentally very different. Classic hard disks store information on spinning magnetic disks, while solid-state drives store information on silicon chips and have no moving parts.
The advantage of classic hard disks (HDD) is that they are very cheap and in the event of a failure, data from them can always be at least partially recovered by specialised data recovery firms. On the other hand they are very slow in comparison to solid-state drives.
Solid-state drives (SSD) are lightweight, resilient to shocks and very fast. Although they were initially very expensive, manufacturing improvements have made them affordable for most consumers. Apart from the high price, their only downsize is that in case of a failure, effective data recovery can be very difficult. For this reason it is recommended to backup the most sensitive information to a secondary storage, like an external drive or in cloud.
The internals of a laptop ssd (top) and a laptop hdd (bottom)
Although most solid-state drives (SSD) come in the same form factor as classic hard disks, they can also be much smaller and compact. Such is the case of M.2 SSDs, which are not only small, but also significantly faster.
Most laptops today can have both an M.2 slot and a normal hard disk, but usually just one of them is used. If both are used, then the fast M.2 SSD is used to store system files and improve performance, while the second hard disks is used to store user files and keep storage costs low.
An M.2 SSD
Laptop storage has two main characteristics:
- read/write speed – measured in megabyte per second (MB/s)
- capacity – measured in gigabyte (GB)
* Note 1024 MB = 1 GB.
For classic hard disks read/write speeds depend on rpm (rotations per minute) and disk capacity. Rotations can be either 5400 or 7200 per minute. Disk capacity indirectly affects speed, because a higher disk capacity requires higher information density and higher information density helps retrieve information faster.
For solid-state drivers speed depends on a multitude of factors. The only way to evaluate their speed is to look at real life tests or if the producer supplies some technical information, which is often not the case. This is why when buying a laptop with an SSD it is very difficult to know in advance the actual speed of the drive. Best case scenario is an educated guess. However, it will certainly be a lot faster than a classic hard disk.
How many gigabytes (GB) ?
The storage space necessary for a laptop differs from user to user. Photos and videos can take up a lot of space. Games can also take up a lot of space. In general, the minimum necessary for a decent user experience is 128 GB. The basic programs and configurations usually take up to 40 GB of space, anything beyond that can be used for user files (photos, videos, documents, games, etc.). Also, for smooth laptop operation, it is recommended to keep at least 20% of available storage free.
Like all laptop components, choosing the right storage solution and capacity depends a lot on needs and budget. As rule, it is best to first look at capacity and then at speed. A laptop left with no free storage is not very useful. Of course, it would be nice if files would load instantaneously, but this is a secondary matter and not critical for laptop operation.
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