Are 512GB (2x 256GB) Solid State Drives Raid 0 enough for storing movies, games, pictures, music, applications etc.?

Are 512GB (2x 256GB) Solid State Drives Raid 0 enough for storing movies, games, pictures, music, applications etc.? I will have the M17x probably for about 2-3 years. Should i go for a bigger hard drive like a 1TB or will 512GB solid state drives be enough? I'm not sure if i should sacrifice the smaller capacity but faster solid state drives for the much larger but slower hard drives.

 

I've downloaded tons of music, movies and games and I never even managed to fill up half of a 500GB RAID array on my desktop, which actually currently stands at only about 200GB full. That's after about 14 months of use. So yes, I'd say 512GB will be plenty unless you're really into your movies.

 

just get an external 1-2tb disk when u need the space .. 2x 256GB is big enough for the time being if ur a normal user.. If ur a hoarder u might need more space than that.

 

thanks for the quick response. I've just recieved my M17x so i'm within my returns period. The thing is when i first switched the computer on, even though i got 512GB solid state drives, i was already down to 430GB and once i installed a game, one or two applications and some updates i'm down to 398GB left. So that's why i'm worried if it that storage space will last me around 3 years. I was surprised that already 82GB was used when i first switched on the laptop when i first got it.

 

You'll need 1 of THESE

 

I store a lot of music, quite a lot of pictures and videos from my camera and video camera, a few games, a few movies but once i watch them i delete them, and a fair amount of applications.

 

Maybe AW now being Dell is also installing a whole load of useless stuff on your computer. Plus dont forget u might also have the backup partition wich varies in size according to the install/machine.

Games these days are quite large.. Cant really help there.

 

...That's a bit overkill.

Ah yes. The Dell crapware.

Check your system and get rid of all the crapware dell has likely installed on it.

 

Lol.. That just might be a little much

I'd go for external storage if u need to store/save game images/movies/alllllloooot of music but doing so with an external disk of a networked storage ( smaller/cheaper then the Dell ) would be the wisest choice.

 

I've had a look and Dell/Alienware haven't installed much at all just the essentials so very little crapware. Even though i ordered 512GB my computer is saying the maxium storage available is 461GB. I guess all that space is being used by the recovery partition and storage drives never have the actual storage space that is advertised. When i first switched it on it showed about 430GB free of 461GB so i guess the 31GB is used by the operating system and preinstalled programs.

 

Yes, that'd be about right. The drive always has less storage than the rated amount after formatting, and there is space taken up by the recovery partition.

 

so do you think it's better to go with the faster and smaller capacity 512gb solid state drives or larger capacity but slower 1TB hard drives if you had the choice?

If i got a bigger hard drive i wouldn't have to worry about an external hard drive so everything would be on my laptop where ever i go with it.

 

Yeah it was a joke. Roughly 20TB would cost you $300K.

 

i couldn't open that link but i think 20TB would be slight over kill

 

I'd personally go with the SSD. They offer blazing fast boot and shutdown times, they do offer very fast loading times, and they are really reliable. (The Intel X25-M will go for 5 years, writing 100GB of data a day! Now that's nice.) They do slow down over time (for a different reason than hard drives, the NAND flash memory in an SSD can write to 4KB pages but can only delete in 512KB blocks so when writing something the SSD may need to copy blocks to its cache, change the files in the block on the cache, delete the block and rewrite it.) however only the write speeds slow down, read speeds remain the same. And you don't have to defragment them. In fact the list of advantages goes on and on and on...the only disadvantages are the price and the capacity.

Hmm. That seems just a bit on the expensive side.

I think it can go above 200TB if I read correctly.

 

Again.. just stick with the SSD drives and if the need comes up get a cheap external disk.

 

Thanks for the helpful responses everybody. It's good to hear other peoples opinions.

this is the first good computer that i've owned and it's the only computer that i've ever owned, that's why it's difficult for me to work how much storage will be enough for me. Once i've owned it for a few years then i'll have a much better idea of how much storage i use. The last computer i used i shared with my family and it was very old and only had 40GB of storage lol so i had to hold back and i could hardly do anything with it.

 

I've probably got about 40 movies or so, I don't know how many games (probably like 15-20, although some are older and so smaller) and a few hundred music tracks with a few odd applications and that hits about 200GB, so in my opinion you should have no problem with 512GB of storage.

 

That's about what I need for my HD collection... Right now I'm on 7th 1TB drive.

 

On my M17x I had a 30GB recovery partition which was promptly deleted. On my desktop rig at home I've got 2TB total, and I'm using about 700GB... so I'd say 500 isn't enough, but that's me.

 

The best thing to do is get external drives for your long term storage. I have a 1TB drive with 200 gigs left and that only took me about 6 months to fill. It just depends what you download. I download blu ray rips in 1080p of all the movies i like and I download all my music in FLAC format. Downloading that stuff can easily fill terabyte after terabyte. Note that even though I download all that huge stuff I am only putting 320GB of storage space on the actual laptop. I use the external to store everything and I only put the media I plan on using for the day on the SSD drive. Also the OS and all my apps and games will be on the internal drives. You don't need more than a couple movies on your actual internal drive at a time so the 512GB you have now is way more than enough if you get an external drive to do all the long term storage. Right now I only have a single 250GB HDD but that's only cause I'm waiting for the new 34nm intel ssd's. Which btw will have 320GB versions so you could opt to change back to the 250GB HDD and get 2 320GB SSD's for a total of 640GB if you feel 512 isn't enough plus they will perform better.

 

How long have you been using that computer? What kind of stuff have you got stored on your hard drive?

 

About 100GB worth of movies (700MB-ish each)
About 50GB worth of files (images, drivers, app install files, patches, mods, etc.)
About 300GB worth of TV
About 10GB of music
About 5GB of pictures
The rest is games, apps, and OS stuff.

That's spread over two drives mind. A small raptor for the OS and some apps, then a 1TB drive for storage. Haven't used the second 1TB one yet so for now it's a backup of the other two.

 

it will be enough if you don't have more then 500 gigs of stuff

 

that's pretty obvious unfortunately i'm not a fortune teller i don't how many gigs of stuff i'll have in the future

 

Also don't forget that your System Restore will use up to 15% of your hard drive for restore points.

Right click Command Prompt and run as administrator.

Then, to see how much is allocated to System Restore run the following in the Command Prompt:

Code:

vssadmin list shadowstorage

To change use:

Code:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=[drive letter]: /For=[drive letter]: /Maxsize=[maximum size]

(Don't forget to use the respective suffixes like MB, GB, etc as needed)

You can save some space there. I haven't changed mine though.