Second drive for gaming laptop - should I bit the bullet and buy a stupid ancient HDD?

Reonu · December 31, 2019

It has 1 TB of NVMe storage. It has 2 M2 slots: the first one, taken by the included SSD, is NVMe only. The second one is a NVMe/SATA combo. There's also a SATA port. So 3 storage slots in total.

I love that the laptop has purely SSD storage with no mechanical drives at all. However, what I don't love is that 1 TB of storage isn't exactly enough. I was looking at prices for 2 TB M2 SSDs and hooo boy, they're way too expensive. 2 TB mechanical HDDs are much cheaper but... it's a mechanical drive. I hate the idea of having a mechanical drive inside my laptop. I love being able to move it around while it's on without worrying about killing my storage drives. Also 2.5 HDDs are sooooo slow. ugh.

What would you do in my situation? I was also considering getting a second 1 TB SSD instead, since prices are way more reasonable, and bring the total storage to 2 TB.

I also have a 4 TB external HDD but that's for storing stuff that I don't access often. I want more internal storage.

If you're gonna say that if I can afford this laptop I can afford expensive 2 TB drives... not really. I was hard for me to buy this laptop and now after buying it I'm very short on money atm

Can you recommend me 2 TB and 1 TB SSDs? Preferably NVMe. My biggest priority is for it to be reliable and last a good few years. The included SSD is the OEM version of the 970 EVO btw. (Samsung MZVLB1T0HALR)

AndrewB121 · December 31, 2019

I would go for a 1TB SSD, if you're worried about breaking an HDD. However I don't think an HDD will be too much of an issue, I had an HDD for games in my old laptop for years and it was fine.

Another thing to consider is whether you really need 2TB for games. If you have the external 4TB drive for long term storage then I don't see any reason to need 2TB for games only. I currently only have 1TB and it's fine, I just have to uninstall any games I'm not currently playing. Perhaps a 500gb drive would be fine in the short term? It would certainly be a lot cheaper.