Choice of disks

[JohnMarham56]

Hi,

Am trying to spec a new laptop but cannot choose between

1) 2x 512gb PCIe M.2 SSD
2) 1x 1tb PCIe M.2 SSD
3) 1x 512gb PCIe M.2 SSD plus 512gb 2.5" ssd

I haven't a clue as non of my machines use m.2 ssd. Any advice would be appreciated.

 

[SpyderTracks]

Hi,

Am trying to spec a new laptop but cannot choose between

1) 2x 512gb PCIe M.2 SSD
2) 1x 1tb PCIe M.2 SSD
3) 1x 512gb PCIe M.2 SSD plus 512gb 2.5" ssd

I haven't a clue as non of my machines use m.2 ssd. Any advice would be appreciated.

M2 is the latest SSD format, if you get an NVME m2 they're significantly faster than the old 2.5 SATA SSD's.

Normally you'd have 1 x NVME M2 as the OS drive and then either a 2.5" SATA SSD or HDD as data drive.

 

[ubuysa]

Some general points:

For a performance point of view, two drives are better than one. This is because there can be an I/O operation (a read or a write) in progress to each drive concurrently, so Windows can be reading or writing to the system drive at the same time that an application is reading or writing to the data drive. With only one drive the two I/O operations will have to happen consecutively, which means one of them will be delayed.

Windows and programs are fairly random in their data access patterns, and since they control everything you do you want them on the fastest drive you can afford. That means an M.2 NVMe SSD - the faster the better.

User data is a mixed bag, some data types need fast response times whilst others don't. A rough data hierarchy would be something like this:

Fastest response time (M.2 SSD): large files that must be loaded quickly (high res images, large spreadsheets, large databases etc.)
Medium response time (SATA SSD): small files that must be loaded quickly - most average user data is of this type (word files, simple images, logs, browser caches, etc.)
Slower response time (HDD): files used in real time (music and videos), backups, archives, data for low priority applications, etc.

Since you generally can't fit all four drive types in a laptop you need to compromise. You definitely want an M.2 NVMe drive for the 'system' drive, so you want at least one 256GB or 512GB M.2 NVMe drive. You also want a data drive that's at least 1TB to allow for growth, this can be an M.2 SSD, a SATA SSD, or even an HDD depending on your budget, but for most users an M.2 NVMe drive for data is a waste of money IMO.