On Thu, Aug 15, 2019 at 2:02 PM Ken Dibble krdibble@stny.rr.com wrote:

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SSDs make a lot of sense for speed, weight and less noise and if everything's on the network or the internet, 128 Gb SSD is just as good as a 1TB HDD.

Thanks Ted.

"Everything's on the network or the internet" seems to be a common assumption and is apparently the reason why it's pretty hard to find larger HDDs on laptops that also have the other stuff I want. Weight seems to be a major consideration for marketers, but it isn't for me. We do not keep stuff on the network or the internet here, with some exceptions.

Well, as always, it depends on how you use them.

One of the coolest FoxPro apps I ever shipped worked on 2 Gb 10" tablet-network hybrids with 32Gb SSD storage. Taken into the field for data gathering and docked in the home office to upload data to the mothership and gather tomorrow's assignments. If they dropped one out of their truck onto the driveway, we had to spend another $129 to replace it.

Windows 10 now requires 32 GB of space for itself (build "1903"). That means you need 64 GB in order to cope with the download/installation/cleanup process for those eventual feature "upgrades" that we, as mere pawns in MS's marketing game, are no longer allowed to ignore. And some people have been speculating that the OS space is likely to double to 64 GB in the near future. That would mean a 128 GB HDD would have no room left at all for anything else.

128 Gb (billions of bytes! sheesh!) was a minimum, absolutely. You spec'ced machines without customizing. More is better, nearly always.

So modernity expects a person like me to be happy with 256 GB. But I've always been a fan of over-provisioning because the unpredictable and the unexpected is an everyday thing in my life.

Sure. Are these field machines you expect to be beaten to death in a couple of years or long-term cubicle machines as investments you plan to keep alive for 4-5 year? And what do you run on them? That would guide you to pick between workaday Inspirons vs. high-performance Lattitudes for example, sticking with Dell as a f'rinstance.