Should i buy laptop with 256GB SSD or 1TB HDD?

Hi,

I want to buy a laptop for unity 2018.x which has two storage options: 256GB SSD or 1TB HDD.
What should I choose.

Thanks, in advance.

 

Always choose an SSD. Modern HDDs have a random access performance typically in the 0.5 to 1.0 MB/sec range while a modern SSD is in the 40 to 50 MB/sec range. Most programs benefit massively from this difference. Just as an example Visual Studio takes a good minute to load on an HDD but loads in a couple seconds on an SSD.

 

Also buy a nvme SSD

 

If you have the money, buy a 512 gB SSD. Or buy the 256 gB but also buy at least one external SSD.

What's that?

 

Thanks everyone, I will try ssd.

 

It's a much faster interface than SATA that uses PCI-e

 

Ah, thanks.

The prices are less extravagant than I imagined: https://www.amazon.com/slp/nvme-ssd/ubqshuu8geh24wy

 

A faster interface (typically PCI-e x4) but you need to be able to push the drive to see the difference. If you only have light tasks being performed the drive won't be any faster than SATA. At that point you're far better off investing in capacity.

 

Yeah, there is no reason going for SATA at this point. I would look into PRO for workstations though, more reliable than EVO

 

Always go SSD. Laptop hard drives are notoriously slow compared to desktop hard drives. Laptop hard drives are the worst case storage performance scenario. Using an SSD instead of a hard drive in a laptop will offer a giant performance improvement.

 

SSD but it's surprisingly how fast they fill up.

 

I have two PCIE (system + work) and two SATA SSD (general storage and game) in my laptop and no HDD. 1.5TB sum.
My system SSD is a Samu 512GB 970 PRO, it worth every penny.
Windows 10 restart from almost any state is less than 10 seconds. Boot from cold is about 5-6 seconds.

 

Especially when you consider you're supposed to leave a portion of them empty at all times to maximize performance.

 

Put things that you don't need to launch immediately on an external drive instead of an SSD.

 

Thanks to Cyber Monday my external drive is an SSD.

 

I have like 16tb of external storage. Even on Cyber Monday that would cost me over two grand.

 

X4 raid 2tb pcie ssd ... or nothing!!!!

 

I Rip my 4k Blurays to disk and remux them to .mkv nice to skip the physical disks and just play mkvs in Kodi. But it does take it's space a single 4k movie is 50 gigs

Would be expensive and very unnecessary to have SSD for that kind of storage. I have 4 8TB disks, cheap and perfect for the purpose

 

Get a traditional hard disk, and add an M2 connector. I'm not sure about it, but I gave my parents my old laptop from 2012 which I recently had to clean the keyboard of and nicely discovered that it had two M2 slots connecting the hard disk and stuff to! Explains why it runs so fast for its age. I just bought this 240 GB kingston SSD on Amazon. Cost me $60 US.

 

All m.2 is not nvme, some uses SATA interface. Always check before buying

 

Though is perfectly fine to buy a sata m.2 if it's a educated decision. For example in my HTPC (media player PC) I bought a cheap WD SATA m.2 just because it's nice to have a small disk in a compact chassi

 

Additionally there are two different speeds of M.2 NVMe. There is the "B" key which is only PCI-e x2 and then there is the "M" key which is PCI-e x4.

 

Yeah, and some mobos have both so it's important you put the disk in the correct slot.

 

Well, just for a case study here. I have a Lenovo Core i3 7th Generation laptop with a 256GB SSD internal drive.
And I downloaded Subnautica onto my external 1TB Toshiba HHD drive.
The actual loading time of Subnautica was over 5 minutes to begin with.
But it played very smoothly.
So yes, it will be slower to download and install games onto an external HDD but after everything's all loaded most games will play fine if installed on an external HDD. That's my experience anyway.

 

Games often have few but large data files, this works pretty ok on a slow SATA SSD, but a large visual studio or unit project consists on many small files, it's here were nveme shines

 

SATA is still fine. Not as fast as far as throughput, but you're still far ahead of an hdd.

 

Games usually run just fine from HDD, they have been optimized for it. You don't need SSD if you can't afford it, but if you can afford it, you should go for it, even for the SATA ones are far better than the HDDs. If you still can't afford it, but you can afford some, choose a combo drive, it uses SSD tech as cache, but has a storage capacity as a HDD. It somewhat faster than a HDD but usually slower than an SSD.

 

Subnautica only has to load once. Games with regular loading screens - which is still the majority of games - will have that same minute plus period every time you have a loading screen. It's fine if you spend long periods of time between loading screens, but for a game where you need to constantly go back and forth it's far more annoying.

Hybrid drives are generally a bad investment. It's not that the concept is a bad one but rather the fact that none of the drives on the market have more than 8 GB for their SSD. That's basically worthless for a modern system that does more than boot Windows and run a couple lightweight applications.

A far better alternative is a software solution - like PrimoCache - that combines an HDD with an SSD.

https://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/primo-cache/

 

I keep OS and my main applications on 256 SSD. Everything else goes on 1TB hardrive.

Everything goes real fast this way.

 

It depends what you are doing. If you plan to do a lot of development on it, I'd opt for the larger drive if you can't afford a 512GB or 1TB SSD. Running out of space and having to shuffle things around to make room will be a bigger issue than slower access speeds. I had a 256GB SSD and quickly filled it up. And for performance, if you fill it up, that can cause more performance problems if the OS doesn't have the space it needs to run efficiently than slowness you may not even notice with a spinning disk.

 

how much freespace do you need available on a 256gb SSD?

 

Keeping 10% of an SSD empty at all times should be sufficient to avoid any performance penalties.

 

"How much space do you need?" is really the key question here. If you can comfortably fit in a 256gig SSD then that's clearly the better option, as it'll be faster. If you can't fit in that then the speed is moot and you need the 1T spin drive.

If you don't know how much space you'll need, tell us what you plan to do with it and we might be able to intuit the answer from there.

For what it's worth, my Surface has a 256gig drive, and I work on Unity on that with no issues. I have Unity, a bunch of Adobe software, Visual Studio, Office, version control, and probably Blender and a few other small bits and pieces. I don't have all of the Unity platforms I use installed, which is important to point out - that increases the Unity install size, but some of them also require other software to be installed which can take up loads of space of its own (eg: Android stuff eats up a few extra gig).

I only have one version of Unity installed at a time. I also only keep active projects on there, and don't usually keep more than one build of projects on there at a time.

If you want to play games that will also likely eat space, though it depends on which games. Modern big-budget titles often eat tens of gigs on their own.

On my desktop I have a 512gb SSD for my system drive. Between Windows, a a few versions of Unity, multiple installed platforms (with their additional software and SDKs) and other tools, I think over a third of that drive is used up before considering project files. That's pretty heavy usage, so it won't be indicative of everyone's needs.

 

This totally depends on the work you'll do. If you think it's better for you then buy. Otherwise not.

 

Ofc SSD!

 

SSD. Lighter and faster. Get an external 2.5' hard drive if you need more space.

 

Yeah, for more space need to add external SSD card. If the guy listens too many songs and save them into the computer then need more space.

 

I would move the songs to the external card. An SD card is absolutely nowhere near the performance of an SSD. Unless you have no other choice you don't want anything performance critical on it.

 

Ok, I've decided to choose an 256gb SSD and an external HDD if required.

 

How did that go for you ? I am looking to buy for strictly game devloment and would like to buy today since everything is on sale for black friday ? Thank you in advance

 

Samsung 980 Pro (gen4)

 

There's more to consider than the storage options. Just saying.

 

Only when we've been told what the other options are.

 

I know this thread is old, but 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD are both bad options. That SSD you'll quickly find to be too small, and the HDD will be too slow.

 

I personally think, it is not bad option, if budged is in limit.
But I would rather pick 2-3TB with 7200 RPM, as secondary drive, with possible better cache.

I like keep OS disk / partition purposely small / constrained, to make sure is not overloaded with rubbish over the time. Easier to backup and forces better control on storing data in my opinion.
For example when comes to safely OS reinstall.

 

I currently use two nvme, one Samsung 970 Pro for OS on a 16x interface and a Samsung 980 Pro on a 8x interface. both 1tb drives. 2 TB is enough for desktop job in my opionion. I have 4x8 TB storage too were I can put large stuff that I dont access often