Buy small capacity or large capacity SSDs? It's not just about the price

SSD vs HDD, which is better? The question doesn't seem to need to be answered.

Compared with HDD, SSDs are better in terms of performance, volume, silence and so on. The only advantage of mechanical hard drives is that they have large capacity and an affordable price.

However, with the maturity of SSD technology, the capacity of SSD is larger and price is lower. What we should consider when buying SSD is its capacity in the end. In theory, the SSD with lager capacity is better, no one will turn down a 2TB or even 4TB SSD - realistically, the price is unaffordable.

Therefore, at this stage, it is required to combine users’ own actual needs with SSD characteristics to choose SSD.

Using small-capacity SSDs alone is simply not enough

At present, Solid state drives with a capacity of 64GB or less have been eliminated in the consumer market, entry-level SSDs started at 120GB capacity.

Many people think that just install a system and common software can be, so 120GB capacity is enough. The truth is that 120GB of capacity is really not enough.

Now the more the Windows 10 system uses it will take up more space, even if the garbage is cleaned up regularly, - the system partition in the image above has used up 46GB capacity, which is only Windows 10 itself occupied.

A lot of friends often choose one-click quick installation when installing software, which leads to the browser, QQ, Office and other software are also installed in the system disk. These eventually occupies more system disk space.

This shows for 120G SSD storage, it's hard to cope with the current Windows 10 system and common software.

If you are a gamer or need professional rendering tasks, 120G SSD is far from enough.

After installing system, 120GB SSD does not have much space to install the game - after all, the current games occupy 30-50GB space. The original material of video rendering, animation rendering and graphic design is also very large, so 120GB is completely insufferable.

Therefore, " more than 240GB " has become the gold capacity of computer hard drives today.

If you want to buy a 480G SSD, would you choose a 480G SSD or two 240G combinations? Let's see how the netizens discuss.

1+1>2, small capacity SSD have more advantages
If choosing two small capacity SSDs, you can get two hard disks and more powerful performance. Those who support small capacity SSD say that system is installed on one disk and game is installed on another one. The two disks do not interfere with each other. One disk reads and one disk writes when copying files, which is much faster than copying in a single disk.

There are also some players who have a tight budget can not afford a single large-capacity SSD. So, they decided to buy a small capacity SSD first to experience and then change a large capacity.

Of course, considering the cost, that the combination of large capacity SSD and small capacity SSD is the reason why they choose small SSD. They install system and most commonly used software on NVMe SSD with high speed while general documents and procedures are installed on cheaper SATA SSD. That is similar to the SSD+HDD dual-disk strategy in the past, it can guarantee both performance and capacity.

Large capacity SSD have its advantage
"Definitely buy a big one! Just that an interface", players supporting large-capacity SSD are not in the minority, most of who have laptop with one disk interface. Large-capacity SSD is often more cost-effective considering price of unit capacity.

"Buy 120G SSD now like buy 60G SSD a few years ago. Although the disk is not broken, I no longer want to use it and hope it will be bad sooner." a 3-year SSD user said. When it comes to spent $100 to buy 60G SSDs in 2011, he said that he did not regret because he enjoyed better performance early.

Now it is not enough for 120G SSD to install system and common games and software. With all kinds of garbage files that can’t be cleaned up growing continuously, regret is only a matter of time. For those friends who is not interested in reloading system, choose 240G SSD and 480G SSD is better.

Small capacity is no longer welcome, many SSDs can only be selected at least 240G. This is also the trouble caused by 3D NAND flash-the capacity of a single chip becomes larger. If the total capacity is still so small, it can not play the role of parallel reading and writing and performance will decay very much.

There are two advantages to using a large solid-state drive, which saves interface and makes it easier to compute and call large volumes data.

Many large files cannot be split into different hard disk partitions (such as Steam game folders) and large SSDs can quickly and effectively complete data transfer without the extra steps of consolidating data from each partition first. Large-capacity SSDs can be fine-managed by partitioning, while small-capacity SSDs can hardly combine space into a combination of utilization. Each disk needs to leave a certain amount of space, which forms a certain amount of waste.

Small-capacity SSD have its advantage and larger-capacity SSD have its merit. In most cases, it is recommended for a single large-capacity model. There is no standard to choose the capacity of SSD. 240G can become the contemporary “gold” capacity, mainly because it can better balance the cost, performance and capacity under the effect of SSD+HDD dual disk.

Therefore, if your computer is an old one needed to upgrade or your budget is limited, add a 240GB SSD and a 1T mechanical hard drive to your computer.

If you want to install a new device or you have sufficient budget, it is feasible to completely discard mechanical hard drives using only SSDs. 480GB SSD can basically meet the needs of office and entertainment. There is no doubt that 1TB SSD can meet the needs of games and video.

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