1st and 2nd drives for laptop

[mugelbbub]

Hi Forums,

Hoping for a bit of guidance with drives. I am looking at a build of a laptop (cosms III) and wondering about the configuration / purposing of the 1st Storage Drive and 1st M.2 SSD Drive.

So I want SSD but wondering about how the drives work, as in , is it intended one for programs and one for storage? and if so which way around and what size ?? or do they operate dual purpose in unison.

Apologies if that appears a dumb question.

The laptop is for kids schoolwork, domestic use and a bit of gaming (when they are supposed to be doing homework I guess) and most of our storage is via cloud so not heavy user in that respect (subject to future proofing).

A short lesson would be appreciated.

Thank you

 

[Oussebon]

SSDs are much faster than HDDs.

Usually you'll want Windows, programs, and favourite games on the SSD so that they load faster, and also so that all the operations Windows performs that involves reading or writing to the disk are faster.

SSDs are more expensive than HDDs, however. Files like movies or music don't benefit from being on an SSD. Files like large/complicated databases, photo libraries especially if photo editing, sample libraries for music production, project files for video editing often do benefit from being on an SSD.

Note that for games, it is very easy to swap games between drives (it can be done with just a few mouse clicks in Steam for instance). So even if you have a lot of games, you don't need to buy loads of SSD space for them, you can just swap whatever is flavour of the month to the SSD easily.

So when striking a balance, people usually buy a smaller/medium sized SSD for the OS + programs, and a cheaper, larger HDD for mass storage of files that don't benefit from being on an SSD anyway.

As for how you interact with them as a user, in Windows you'll see a C: drive and (probably) a D: drive. C: being the SSD and D: being the HDD. You can organise your documents and games how you wish. You can manually create folders and move files there. You can tell Steam to create a library folder on each drive so you can swap games between the drives easily. You can tell Windows to move certain folders like "My Videos" to a different location so that your video collection lives in that new location by default.
There's a tutorial on that last one here: https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/74955-move-location-videos-folder-windows-10-a.html

It's all very straightforward

However, if your storage needs are very modest, you could potentially just get (say) a 500gb M.2 SSD and no HDD. Should you ever need more storage in the future you could add an HDD yourself DIY

What is the budget for this laptop?

Instead of the Cosmos VIII , I'd suggest looking at the Vyper. A Vyper with an i5 CPU and a GTX 1050 ti is cheaper than a Cosmos VIII with an i5 and a GTX 1050, but the GTX 1050 ti is ~35% more powerful. Granted you're not building an all-out gaming machine but the graphics card in laptops cannot be upgraded. Therefore once iX new game is too demanding for the laptop, you need to buy a new laptop. A more powerful GPU could postpone that expense. And it's cheaper than a Cosmos with a 1050 anyway.

 

[mugelbbub]

Hi Oussebon,

Firstly thank you for taking the time out to write such a detailed response, very helpful as exactly what I was after.

Will certainly look into your recommendations about the Vyper.


Regards

 

[Oussebon]

No worries, glad it was helpful Keep us posted, and do come back to the forums with any more questions