Of course they are, Windows is unusable with them and that makes the user aware of all the insane stuff in the background saturating the IO bandwidth.

It's totally all the stuff Windows is doing in the background, on Linux with at least 16 GB RAM the difference between a HDD and SSD is less striking. Caching, the BFQ scheduler, and having a lean system goes far.

A 128 GB M.2 or SATA SSD is like $15-20 now. Kind of makes sense for new systems.

For the past fifteen years I found that a main drive of ca 300 GB is needed. 256 GB can cut it if you don’t have many larger files, but 128 GB doesn’t cut it.

I remember back in 2011 when SSDs started becoming popular people would cheap off and get 64 GB drives! And even recommended it for a well balanced system! It’s madness. I bought a 512 GB SSD in 2011 for my laptop, used a 256 GB SSD in a hand-me-down laptop, and 1TB in newer laptops from 2019-2020.

I also use ca 250 GB for rented cloud platforms.

You can’t recommend 128 GB.

These configs exist for a reason: The "developing world", "the on average poor countries", or whatever you might want to call them. This is the market that is currently getting the extreme low-end systems with the OS running on mechanical harddrives which of course is barely usable.

I think a 128 GB solid state drive for Windows and apps and a 1 TB mechanical HDD for media storage could be the basis for a really neat and cost effective little laptop. Just make sure the Downloads folder is mapped to the mechanical HDD by default...

> ... and a 1 TB mechanical HDD for media storage ...

Agree. The problem - at least for laptops - appears to be that it's getting harder to find models that come with slots/interfaces for HDDs.

But then the default is managing a second hard drive for your files. I suspect many people don't know what a hard drive is.

It's possible to move required Windows folders to a separate drive during installation. For the past 10 years, I've had my Users directory on a hard drive, leaving everything else on an SSD. As long as I don't install too many things on the SSD (like games), I've never had to worry about where everything is. Although there's warnings about 'this isn't supported', I haven't been burned.

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/1964-move-users-folder-l...

A cheap 10 year old business computer with SSD can be a rocket compared to a new low end machine.

One more reason to switch to Linux!

Yeah! Go use Linux on your slow dinosaur drives! That'll show em!