Recommendations for laptop drive

[Fire Yoshi]

Hello fellow users,
I just got myself an ASUS K501LX laptop, and it only comes with a pre-installed 256GB M.2 SSD. That's great and all, but I find it a bit short to install my Steam library and other stuff (Unity projects, video editing, etc.).
The laptop has an open SATA drive bay, but it's limited to a 7mm height form factor. The only HDDs that can fit in there are all 500 GB, so I'm wondering whether I should get one, or put more money into something like a 480/500/512 GB SSD. Keep in mind I need at least that amount of drive space to hold all my stuff.
Also, would an external hard drive be fast enough to play Steam games? Like, could I plug it in my laptop and play games from it without incredibly slow loading times?

 

TL;DR: 7mm HDD, SSD, or external hard drive, and which one?

[Captain_WD]

~snip~

 

Hey there Fire Yoshi,

 

If you use the USB3.0 port on your laptop, it shouldn't bottleneck the performance of an external drive and it should be perfectly fine. Do have in mind that some games and applications cannot be installed on external storage drives. I could suggest checking out WD My Passport and WD Elements Portable as viable solutions. Both should work perfectly fine and be fast enough for gaming and other work.

WD My Passport: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=zekVQo

WD Elements Portable: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=tZ0wh1

 

For mobile (2.5") HDDs that are 7mm high I could suggest checking out WD Blue and WD Black for good performance and reliability. Just make sure the specific model is the 7mm version and not the larger one (you can see that in the drive's spec sheet):

WD Blue: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=YXkmVG

WD Black: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=mt2ahT

 

Feel free to ask if you happen to have questions

 

Captain_WD.