SSD or HDD ?

Hi, I need help from experienced users,

I am a graphic designer and use Photoshop for image editing/grapich design.....

I decide to buy a laptop with 256gb SSD and then buy a 1tb HDD as external hard disk, what your thoughts on this?
or simply should i buy laptop with 1tb hard disk?

 

Welcome to the laptop forums site

It's the graphics's card that more important for your usage.

256 gb ssd are so cheap, check amazon.

It may pay you to go for a laptop with a 1tb hdd fitted then buy
the ssd separately then swap them over.

If you choose this option you can save money.

The software you will require is called “mini tool partition wizard”

This will allow you to copy/clone your hdd system over to your new ssd drive

https://www.partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html

 

Yes, I second the graphics card on being important here for the graphic design work. With Adobe Photoshop you'll end up needing the extra space for scratch disks, but if you can get a system with a high amount of DDR3 or DDR4 ram on it, you can shift the majority of what you need for the graphics editing to ram, and then page the rest to the hard drive in a scratch disk file.

You'll have a lot of space to do that with on a 1TB hard drive, but the magnetic hard drives are really slow by comparison, and you'll start to feel it without defragmenting often with a 5400rpm laptop drive (or even a 7200rpm drive under stress).

The price of magnetic drives are getting cheaper more quickly than the price of SSDs, though. I just got an 8TB external drive (magnetic) for storage for about $198 the other day, so if you need a ton of space to store or consolidate one or more external drives, then there's still a use and a purpose there with the magnetic drives. You get a whole lot of space for way less money if you only need to access it once in a while, and you don't carry the drive around with you. If it's that type of arrangement, you can get a huge external drive for cheap now. However, if you want a faster system today with plenty of space until the day you can get a 1TB SSD drive, then I would just get an SSD for your main system instead.

The prices on SSD drives are gradually starting to come down this year where you can get a 480GB drive for under $100. Personally, if it were me I would just go with the 250GB SSD drive, and then image the drive to a 640GB drive or higher later. By the time you've filled up the 250GB drive (even if you're doing a lot of daily design work with it and saving finished files to the drive along with the temp space), you'll likely be able to get a 1TB SSD for nearly the same price as a 480GB SSD today to replace it with and copy everything to that.

You'll be able to convert your 250GB SSD drive into an external drive with an enclosure for about $25 or $30 too, and that way have a smaller but shock-resistant external drive backup of your works and be able to use that in a pinch if you ever need it but without any slowdown like you'd have with the larger >1TB external drives.

Ideally, you'll probably want to change out all your magnetic drives to SSDs over time when you can afford to. Right now, we're in the inbetween stage with the industry, so the magnetic drives are competing for largest space for the lowest dollar amount, while SSD drives are competing for the fastest speed at the best all-around price.

I would make use of any magnetic drives you have for cheap now if you've already bought them and use those as backups for your backups maybe, but it makes sense to gradually migrate everything over to one or more SSD drives for faster use and productivity in the future.

Once you use an SSD rather than a magnetic drive, you'll start to appreciate the speed and advantages of it to where you wouldn't want to go back to a magnetic drive again if you had the choice.

No more defragmenting and most bottlenecks disappear when you don't have to worry about moving parts anymore.

 

I am actually doing a research of SSD because it is a new technology. At the outset, it is far advantageous than HDD for the simple reason that an HDD has a rotating part and subject to overheating (I have experienced this problem). With the SSD, it has no moving part so it's more encouraging. However, the first consideration is the cost. As of now, SSD is not viable for me because it is expensive. Another thing is the durability. It is not time-tested like the HDD. What if suddenly the contents of the SSD are erased by itself?

 

An SSD is really great and it's a huge difference between one and an HDD, I would personally keep that SSD and buy a 1TB 7200 RPM HDD that will be good enough for storage. Put your OS and important stuff on the SSD and you should be good to go.

 

The storage choice that you made is the correct one. Having your operating system and programs installed on a SSD drive and saving your projects onto a bigger HDD drive is becoming current practice.

 

Having both a SSD and HDD is a very good choice you've made! Store important programs, documents and applications; those that you need to run as fast as possible, on the limited space of the SSD. Not-so-important things like downloads, images, word documents etc. can be stored on the larger and cheaper (but slower) space of the HDD.

 

Personally, I am clueless when it comes to the guts inside of a computer. The only thing I know is that the bigger the numbers, the better

 

That isn't always true, when it comes to CPU's it's become more complicated then that. This was true in the past, the more MHZ you had the better, now days your CPU's architecture is more important then it's actual speed.

 

HDDs are just fine in most cases, you don't really need an SSD unless of course if you're doing graphics designing it could be beneficial but not by much, right now you can find HDDs way cheaper and faster than they were before and you should go for them if you don't have the extra money to invest in an SSD.

 

I agree on this, did not think of it earlier. Yeah, an SSD for the OS will surely make it faster for the computer since there is no moving parts in the storage (assuming that we are correct to say that SSD access is faster than the rotating head of the HDD). And the external storage need not be an expensive SSD since archiving does not require speed anymore. I think I will do that when we buy a new computer soon.

 

They did try and create a hard drive with both systems. They were known as hybrid drives but they just didn't do that well on the market. This on the other hand doesn't mean that you can't take advantage of this concept. If you need extra space all you need to do is replace the HDD without having to reinstall your OS. It's a win win situation.

 

SSD if you want to use it as a primary storage device. HDD if you want to use it as a backup storage device. And as already mentioned, graphics cards are important. You can even get an external graphics card adapter to boost your laptop's power, and you can connect to an external monitor to get the full effect of the new external graphics card.

 

I would go for the SSD. It's many times faster than an HDD. Some people say that it has a shorter working life but from the reports I have read, an SSD is good for many years. That's more than enough. In just a couple of years, there will be newer models with better specs and lower prices.

 

Use a SSD as primary hard drive will make a day and night difference in boot up the computer, and opening programs, or load up something. You should definitely go for a SSD. If money is not a concern, I'd suggest you get a 512GB SSD. For graphics, the files are quite big and they can easily fill up your hard drive. Even for external hard drive, one of mine is a 512GB SSD. It was actually the SSD I got for my older laptop, but the laptop finally died on me shortly after the upgrade, so I took it out and got an enclosure for it. Even as an external hard drive, the SSD is much faster than the traditional HDD. The difference shows when I transfer files.

 

If you can't get a big SSD, even a small one would make a lot of difference. According to some tests, you can boot up from an SSD in about 10 seconds. From an HDD, it would take about 30 seconds. As for getting an SSD big enough for your graphics file, that might be a big costly. The usual configuration is to have a smaller SSD upfront for the operating system and a bigger HDD for the rest of the files. Make sure you get an HDD with 7200rpm. That's quite a bit faster than the 5400rpm model.

 

RPM is not the only factor in the performance of a traditional spinning hard drive. Heck, all the different model of same RPM hard drives had different speed.

7200RPM makes one difference for sure. Since it spins faster than 5400RPM hard drives, it will consume more power. In the case of a laptop on battery, it will drain your battery quicker.

SSD will also prolong the battery life since it consume less power due to no moving parts.


Sure "a small one would make a lot of difference". The capacity does not affect the performance. Yet a smaller SSD will get full quicker. SSD is just like HDD when it comes to slowly down. When there is less than 15~20% free space, SSD will be slowed a lot. So a larger capacity SSD will give you better chance at managing free space.
Nowadays unless you are sure your computing needs is very basic without involving in large programs nor large amount of files. I'd always recommend to go for a 256GB SSD minimal. 512GB is better. Modern programs are getting bigger and bigger. I have seen 50GB video games... I'd imagine they will only get bigger in the future.

 

Seems like it is truly a matter of convenience here. If I were going off of personal recommendations though, I would have to choose the SSD here, but that might be just because I am more familiar with that.

 

I have just ordered an external Hard Disk Drive for archiving purposes. It is a 2 TB HDD with a USB plug for convenience and it is also the slim type. Costing only 5k pesos, that's just a little over $200 USD. What's good is that it comes with a 3-year warranty so that means we are worry-free for 3 years. The vendor is an acquaintance who gave me a good discount and who also helped me decide between an SSD and an HDD. She said that the SSD is not time-tested yet so there is a hidden risk unlike the hard disk which has been with us for decades now.

 

No, it's not really true that the SSD is not time-tested yet. It doesn't take ten years to test the usability of a storage device. Some people even complain that an SSD has a shorter working life than an HDD. However, even for an SSD, we are talking about decades of working life. That's way more than enough for anyone.