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...