Laptop Storage

Most Laptop Storage is one hard drive and one CD/DVD drive.

However there are a few high end notebooks that have two hard drives, the ones that have the second hard drive also have the larger display.

But for most notebook users one hard drive is all that will fit in to the case.

If you need more capacity for your notebook you will need to upgrade the size, have an external device, or shared network drive for your excess files.

My friends at PCMech have an article about which is cheaper a high capacity hard drive or an optical drive (CD/DVD) you can read it and decided .

Personally with a 1 or 2 terabyte drive the hard drive is the lighter alternative, who wants to carry fifty to one hundred DVD's with them when they travel?

A couple of weeks ago I got the Linux bug again and needed some room on my new laptop's hard drive, it is a 250 GB with two partitions so I made an image of the OS (XP) partition, the hidden restore partition, then connected my external hard drive (500 GB) to the laptop and copied the images and the data on the external hard drive.

Then I deleted all the partitions, created a new XP partition, then put the XP back on the hard drive.

Once I had the image on the hard drive I made the XP partition the Active partition and started XP, then I made two more partitions, one for data (about 150 GB) and one for Linux.

Now if the laptop had two hard drives I wouldn't of had to use an external hard drive, I could of used the second hard drive to make the Linux partition, but I only have one.

Troubleshoot, repair, maintain, upgrade & secure...     With this!

Well then there is the SSD (Solid State Drive) factor to consider, a SSD (Laptop Storage) is a little bit lighter, consumes less power, creates less heat. From my research the largest SSD now available is 1TB, seems to have topped out at that size, I can't find a reason, but I would hazard a guess it is the size of each memory chip.

For your Laptop Storage you can either live in a smaller drive or can afford a larger SSD the power savings will give you added battery usage because the SSD is memory with out any moving parts where as a mechanical hard drive has two motors and motors need amperage to make them work, amperage means the battery will drain faster.

(I have one 64GB SSD that isn't being used, I may put that in my XP laptop when I am finished testing Linux)

That brings us to the optical drives.

My new laptop has a CD/DVD, it isn't a Blue Ray player but my Misses' new ASUS has a Blue Ray player and with the larger display the video is outstanding.

The last part of this article on laptop storage is about the new USB 3.0 standard. The two new laptops we have are USB 2.0, I bought a PCMCIA card that is USB 3.0 (I have a USB 3.0 PCIe add on card in my Desktop and an 500 GB USB 3.0 external drive).

The reason for buying a USB 3.0 add on card for the laptops to take advantage of the speed of USB 3.0, doing backups just got 10x faster.

When I bought the two new laptops I looked at some with USB 3.0, the additional $200 that most of the laptops with USB 3.0 was the deal breaker for me (that is for the brands I would buy) so maybe the next laptop I buy will have USB 3.0 built in...

What it comes down to is how much do you need, how long will the battery last, and how much weight do you want to carry. TB of DVDs? Extra pounds of batteries? Less storage, less weight?

I am going for the SSD...