New laptop - Solid state or HDD?
 

Since this one is starting to have problems, it is time to look for a new laptop, For someone who uses it to access the internet and household/basic office stuff, which is the better option? It won't be used for gaming, if that makes a difference. I have not been computer shopping in about 5 years, so any advice is appreciated

Thanks!

there's no advantage to traditional HDD . It just comes down to if you're price sensitive to the difference in cost . I would get a smaller SSD and use the cloud for storage

What about a laptop with 512gb or TB of storage? Do they still make $400 netbooks with a lot of storage?

if you have the $budget, get a laptop with dual drives - one SSD with enough storage to contain your OS and all of the programs you'll run, and one large HDD drive to manage all of your data that isn't offed to a USB drive or Cloud

with this setup, you'll boot up super fast, and open programs super fast, and yet not break the bank with a super-size SSD that isn't getting used to its fullest potential

I run this exact configuration for my account management day-job, and also my home-based small business (CNC manufacturing and consulting) and it's been perfect for both reliability and cost

Even "super sized" SSDs can be had for $130 or less for a 1TB size, so this is diminishing rapidly as a factor.

Happy to recommend something, but you haven't noted your budget. There are a lot of $500 laptops out there with 256gb SSDs; that size seems large enough for most.

This is what I did, an HP with a 120GB SSD and 1T HD (a bit much but the cost difference was minimal). Full boot time is about 30 seconds but can be used before it is done. All my programs and data are on the HD. I backup to the cloud and a smaller drive fairly regularly. Definitely the way to go.

PP

Aside from the speed difference (substantial) and the price difference (way less than it used to be), SSDs are much less susceptible to accidental damage. If you drop a running laptop with a magnetic disk drive on a concrete floor from table height, you will have an expensive paperweight. Your data will be current only as of your last external backup. If you drop a laptop with a solid-state drive the same way, you will probably destroy the screen and maybe mess up some of the innards, but the SSD itself will almost certainly survive. You (or a techie) will be able to remove it and recover everything that was on it. A dual-drive strategy will not allow you to do this, as your SSD will probably only hold things you could reinstall anyhow.

And do you know what sentence is said most often just before someone drops a computer? it's "Oh, I never drop my computer."

SSD. Even if you don’t game or otherwise put your computer through heavy use, it will be much more responsive and will have a longer usable life. Mechanical hard drives have been the slowest parts of computers for a long time. I have laptops that are almost 10 years old that were once destined for the dumpster... replacing the HDD with a SSD removed the most severe limiting factors and breathed new life into them and to this day they are still perfectly sufficient for routine household use.

Personally, I would go for SSD. I'm not big into gaming either but the difference in speed is really remarkable. You can go for SSHD (I think is what they're called) if you want both speed and storage, less expensive than SSD.

Another vote for SSD. Generally less heat, which is important for laptop users, and as others have noted, smaller capacity SSDs have come down in price.

And if price is even more of a concern, there are plenty of machines with eMMC drives of 64GB that probably fit your use case, whether they're Chromebooks or Windows 10 machines if you need tighter integration with the Microsoft universe. My last two travel machines have been computers running Windows with eMMC, one with 32GB (which started in Windows 8 and was upgraded to Windows 10) and the current one with 64 which was Windows 10 out of the box. Microsoft has advised that updating 32GB drives is going to become more problematic, which is one of the reasons I went to 64GB. I add a microSD card (currently 256GB) to handle larger file storage. I've had no problems either with storage or with the performance of my current machine.

These aren't world beaters, but given the uses you've described, they might fit your needs. As a review for my current machine says, it's a typewriter with internet--I suspect a lot of people are actually looking for something pretty close to that in a laptop computer.

Of course, there is no way such a machine would be good for a power user, but if you're running an internet browser, an email client, and a word processor, then I'd focus on the screen size you want and your budget.

Definitely SSD. The difference in speed is tremendous. Especially for the NVMe SSD drives. They are much more rugged to physical shock than HDs. You can get large SSD drives. I would never consider getting a new PC without an SSD drive (at least for the boot drive).

There is just really no world today where I wouldn’t use an SSD in a laptop. In a tower, I would probably do a hybrid, with a HDD with 2-4TB for storage, but in a laptop unless I were sooo $$ constrained, I’d go with SSD as the primary “OS drive and get as much storage as I could up to 512/1TB and then augment if I need a lot more storage with some external SSD or even HDD drives for external storage, or again, a hybrid with some 1TB SSD for rapid portable storage and a 4-6TB small form factor HDD for larger longer term storage and backup.

Reasons. Speed, reliability and physical mechanical robustness for a portable overall.

when you search for laptops, there are a couple of things to look for

"normal" 2.5" SATA drive - can be a regular HDD (spinning platter), or a 2.5" SATA SSD

m.2 slot - can fit a m.2 SATA SSD or m.2 nvme SSD (depends on laptop)
m.2 is physically smaller, comes in different lengths (different laptops can support different lengths) - https://www.performance-computer.com...ssds-compared/


whats the difference between SATA and nvme?
nvme protocol can provide much faster speeds than SATA (depends on actual product though). typically more $

for your laptop:
if you have an existing spare 2.5" HDD. you can buy a laptop that allows both, comes with m.2 SSD (and you can put your 2.5" HDD inside)

hands down, definitely get a laptop with SSD. very common to find laptops that offer SSD preconfigured

SSD, without a doubt.

I would read reviews carefully of budget laptops - an putting an SSD in one might reveal that it has a terrible processor that basically can't handle anything, for example (whereas the laptop $30 more might be much better).

If you are somewhat tech savvy or good with hardware, you can always buy a laptop with HDD then buy an SSD and the equipment to copy everything (a 500gb SSD with that should be under $90).

SSD for sure. There is no reason to use a HDD for any portable device now that SSDs are relatively cheap. The only use I can think of for HDDs is archival and mass storage but other than that SSD all the way. It is the single most noticeable jump in snappy-ness (how fast it feels) that you can do now adays.