Is a 250GB hard drive a good size?

I plan on purchasing a fair amount of games, as well as mods for said games and some movies (not many). I already ordered the M11X tuesday, is it possible to have them change this while in production (I don't know if I'll do it yet, but still)?

 

it depends on how many games you will have. I have games and music.

 

I have both the m17x R2 and the Area-51 m15x. And I use both for gaming, while my m17x has 1 TB total capacity, my area-51 m15x has like 80 gb total capacity. Granted I went Solid State 80 Gbs on my portable notebook is more then enough to utilize as my mobile PC. Essentially I would say that if it's not your primary PC 250gb should be more then enough space, unless you're downloading non-stop even on the go.

Hope this helps. I'd also like to assume that anyone who has a m11x also has another PC, as it SHOULD NOT BE YOUR ONLY PRIMARY MACHINE. I feel bad for those, if any, who are in that situation. Because that really isn't a great primary PC solution.

 

If you have lots of games, mods, and movies, I would spring for a 500GB.

 

EVen then though what are you doing with ALOT of games on a m11x, I mean the thing is power but it's not that powerful, nor is it that Great in terms of it's only an 11 inch screen I mean how many games/hours do you really want to spend on this thing?

All I'm saying is it's a substitute not a primary, and you should treat it that way otherwise you might end up breaking it.

 

Well, it is my primary PC, why the hell shouldn't it be? I spent over $1000 on it and it works flawlessly, I live in a 900 square feet apartment, how can I even justify having another PC??

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=467003

 

I don't know, call me crazy, but Net Books (And this technically is a netbook) should NEVER be primary PC's. I mean you don't even have an optical drive, and for that kind of cash you could have gotten an m15x new from the alienware outlet for the same price if not cheaper that's a WHOLE lot better in terms of performance. Thus if you needed portability that's just it portability, not Primary.

 

The idea of a primary machine is down to opinion. All I'm asking is if a 250GB drive is good for games and mods (I won't have a lot of movies and music, nor pictures).

 

Portable drives are dirt cheap. If you're comfortable with the screen size I think it would be a great machine, also for a primary computer.

 

I depends how many *cough* swedish *cough* movies you plan to store. I have 250GB, currently have half of it free. I do however have another desktop computer with 250GB, and the drive from my old laptop of 320GB.

If this was the only computer I had, I would probably buy 500GB one - it's cheaper to buy one from Amazon, NewEgg (~$100) and then put it than "upgrading" it from Dell. Depends what do you store. I have few gigs of mp3s, few games (Crysis, Just Cause 2, Fallout 3 and Football Manager 2010 atm), few bigger apps (MATLAB, Mathematica, Adobe Photoshop+Acrobat CS4) and some TV shows on. Which I mostly delete after I'm done watching. This would give you 1 extra drive, but you can buy one of those little USB hard drive docks and have the either one as "mobile" drive where you can store other stuff.

 

I opted for the 160g 5400rpm drive so Im not wasting money when I put the 1000gb drive in.

 

I'd go for the biggest hard drive you can get, since the m11x has no disk drive, you need to download games via steam, or purchase a game and copy it to your harddrive and use that file as a virtual disc (which is not allowed, but since you bought the game I see few moral issues here) which will take a lot of hardware space. If you are a gamer i'd go for 320 gb atleast, and 250 gigs at the very minimum if you have no other choice...

 

get at least 320GB, 250 in my opinion not for people who uses the computer for everything, from gaming to doing work.

 

500GB minimum.

 

I kind of wanted to upgrade to 320GB, but I ordered Tuesday, so I'm guessing it's too late. The opinions seem to be varied, so I'll see how it goes.

 

if your planing on saving alot of movies then i highly recommend atleast 500gb. reg hdd are pretty cheap these days so why not just buy another hdd.

 

Depends on how much media you have. For games and os it should be plenty. You could always have a 500gb external to store stuff you don't regularly use.

If it had the 11x and had the cash I would put the intel 160gb ssd in it.

 

It's an awesome size. 500GB is even MORE AWESOME.

Only you can determine how much HDD/SSD space YOU need.

 

After looking at aftermarket prices of SSDs I wanted to bite on the 512GB as the $200 savings at configuration would have been nice. Sadly it was too late and my order could not be adjusted; I'll just have to wait for a good deal....which seem to be few and far between.


Woulda, shoulda, coulda.

 

Agreed, if you have too much movies for example you can always store them on an external hard drive, and if your laptop hard drive dies because you moved your laptop around too much (moving = lethal for hard drives which aren't SSD) you will still have them. I think that even if you play a lot of games 250gig will suffice for a while.

 

I actually agree with this. Okay maybe not minimum, but 320gb is probably a minimum if you have really large archived music, video and game collections. I hate having a cluttered drive and I'm surprised how much space can be needed sometimes. It's all music and games for me so far.

 

Don't know if it's possible to change it while in production...can't hurt to ask...especially if you didn't negotiate a 'deal' when purchasing your m11x...

Typical modern game installations are 5GB to 10GB and a typical movie file in DVD format, after you've stripped out the menus/extras, is 3GB to 5GB...there are lots of compression techniques that you can use to get the size to around 1GB without a noticeable loss in image quality...

Finally, a 250GB drive is really 250GB * 0.93 = 232 GB. Of this 232 GB, about 20GB will be consumed by Windows 7.

Therefore, you have around 210GB of space remaining for games and movies on your HDD.

Or, in other words, around 15 to 35 games AND 10 to 20 movies...unless, you have an OCD-based need to collect like I do (music, movies, electronic books, games) then you should be fine with your purchase...

I think the difference between the 250GB 7200 rpm drive for the m11x and the 500GB 7200 rpm drive is $100 which is about what you will pay if you buy a 500GB 7200 rpm drive from Amazon, New Egg, eBay, etc ($85 to $120 on eBay).

You're correct that you can buy a kit to use the original Alienware installed drive as an external drive, but 250GB drives may not be worth the effort anymore...

You would almost be as well off purchasing the 500GB installed from Alienware and then buying a 250GB external drive pre-packaged in an enclosure...unless you don't like the make of HDD that Alienware is using and you plan on doing a clean install of Windows anyway...

Six of one, half dozen of the other...

If you need the HDD space, I would use the Alienware upgrade and not worry about getting into the fingerpointing between Dell and your HDD vendor should something go wrong within the warranty period...

May want to make sure that the m11x bay can handle a 1TB drive...after 750GB, the HDD height went from 9.5mm to 12.5mm (at least on Western Digital...not sure about Seagate, Hitachi, Toshiba, etc)...I would check before buying though...

 

Yeah but what I am saying:

- Giving $100 to Dell you upgrade 250GB to 500GB. You end up with 1x 500GB HD.
- Giving $100 to Amazon/NewEgg you buy *another* 500GB hard drive. You end up with 1x 250GB, 1x 500GB.

 

I chose for the 320GB HDD(smallest available in my country), and I will probably only store some games and stuff for school on it, I store music and movies on my desktop (1,5TB ftw!) and I also have a small 500GB portable harddisk. Portable HDD's are extremely cheap, and very useful.