HDD vs SSD for a travel laptop?

score:9

Accepted answer

I can't think of any advantage to an HDD, other than cost.

  1. Even with automatic parking, the risk of a scratch from a drop is non-trivial, if the drive is in use. (My fairly severe drop resulted in a straight-line gouge across about a quarter of the drive. Luckily, every file not crossing the gouge could be recovered in full.)
  2. They use more battery power, so you will need to find a charger more often.
  3. They are heavier and noisier.

Upvote:4

I was just going to leave you with Andrew's answer, but then I saw you tagged your question , so I figured I have something to add.

You absolutely should use an SSD instead of HDD. I spent several months on a bicycle tour of North America last year and took a brand new ThinkPad E570 with me. Instead of a hard drive I installed a 256GB NVMe drive and a 1TB SSD. I also had an external rotational hard drive in a USB enclosure, which I occasionally brought out to store large video files and other backups.

It was bumped around repeatedly and took a lot of cosmetic damage. I broke the screen twice, somehow killed the DVD burner, and completely wore out the left button on the trackpad.

But I had thought ahead and got next-day on site service, which I made liberal use of. Each time they came to wherever I was, provided it had an address, and fixed it the next day as promised.

With all that, though, nothing ever went wrong with any of the drives.

I would recommend you strongly consider getting a new laptop with such an on-site warranty service, if your budget allows it. You may end up having to use it, and if you do you'll be very glad you had it.

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