The humble workhorse
This is another relatively easy section to get through, though again comes with small nuances which are deserving of a closer look. First of all, the most common form of storage device is, of course, the faithful Hard Disk Drive. Every increasing in capacity and reliability, they are found in practically every laptop that this guide is focused upon. Whilst there may be a few problems in terms of fragmentation and degradation, not to mention they don’t like being dropped, technology has evolved to make them the mainstay.
The most common sizes of HDD in laptops go up in 250GB, starting at, 250GB and moving up to 500GB and 750GB, though occasionally leading up to a 1 Terrabyte. It often depends on what you are going to be doing on your laptop, and this often reflects the specifications (and thus the price) of the entire thing. Only thinking of installing some basic productivity applications and writing a lot? 250GB will do you fine, but if you’re going to be handling a lot of media or games, again, the more space the better. Of course, you can nearly always upgrade the hard drive in a laptop, with some laptops even coming with two HDD bays. Bear in mind, they are 2.5″ HDD, so don’t be buying a cheap and huge 3.5″ drive and trying to squeeze it in. But you wouldn’t do that would you?
These little devils are a growing market, offering fast speeds and growing storage space
The other thing to consider with Hard Disk Drives is the drive speed. Whilst the majority are 5,400 RPM drives, some faster drives, at 7,200 RPM, are beginning to appear at a far greater frequency, which offer a performance boost on read speed, but often are more expensive and thus, are compensated for on size. If you are concerned that a 5,400 RPM drive won’t be streaming you por…HD movies fast enough, you always have the option of a 7,200 RPM drive. However, if speed is your prime concern…
Solid state drives are the newer generation of internal storage that has gained some momentum in the enthusiast desktop market, and also now the laptop market slightly. Basically, these are flash drives, just designed to be more ‘HDD’ in appearance, which come in a variety of sizes, the largest feasible drive in terms of cost being 256GB, but many pluck for smaller drives and install just the operating system and a few regularly used programs. This can hugely improve the load speed of the operating system, but is not really suitable for storing documents and files, or games really. You also don’t want to be constantly writing to a SSD, as they have limitations on that, though not as severe as the early models.
Some people say that there are benefits to having a windows system partition of only 10-15GB’s on your hard disk drive, just so you can limit de fragmentation and perhaps gain a few seconds in load times. It’s a bit of a weird science that may not pay off, but if you’re lucky enough to find a machine with two drive slots (one of the few I found were the 17″ Sony Vaio E series), then a SSD and HDD solution could be pretty awesome. You can opt with some manufacturers to just have the SSD in the laptop, though it would be considerably more expensive.
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Josh Dean
Josh came to Game-Engine after running several other “web destinations” into the ground with constant re-designs and feature sets. After founding a website based about games, which again, suffered the fate of a perfectionist, yet poor, designer, Game Engine was created as a way to channel those energies in the direction of a poor, vunerable website. Afer co-founding Game Engine on a historic moment in intergalatic history, Josh turned his attention to web development yet again, muddled through it, and then started to “write” about what is probably his most normal interest, video games. Now Josh has expanded into poorly recorded screen captures and talking into cameras with painstaking conviction, as well as keeping up playing a lot of video games, then claiming that they are either ‘awesome’ or ‘rubbish’.
