Can he download stuff like a regular hard drive where you get 256gb of space or is it like a cloud service or something?

  • hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    HDD (Hard Disk Drive) is like a CD, slower but more storage.

    SSDs (Solid State Drive) are like flash drives, they are faster but not as much storage.

    Also if your drive breaks, an HDD often only fails in part so your data might be recoverable. If SSDs fail, they fail all the way, and there’s no way to get it back.

    And then there’s some quirks about secure delete, fragmentation, the amount of certified writes and things like that, but this is only a broad overview.

    Also if you hear internal or external, that means external you gotta plug in via USB, while internal drives you have to open your case, insert the drive and connect it to the mainboard and power supply.

    And M.2 drives are just way smaller SSDs that are always internal and they can be a lot faster than normal SSDs, but they need their own special slot on the mainboard.

    I hope this helps :)

    Also asking for the certified hardware nerds to correct and supplement my comment ^^

  • ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    Yes it’s the same storage size (SSD vs mechanical doesn’t change that). But I would caution to get a larger drive. From my experience, 256gb gets pretty limiting. I would go with at least 512gb.

  • timmytbt@sh.itjust.works
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    6 days ago

    Others have answered your questions. Just wanted to point out that 256GB is not very big, depending on how much your brother wants to download (and how much of what he downloads he wants to keep).

    • Don_Dickle@lemmy.worldOP
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      6 days ago

      He is a moviephile and some seasons of tv that is about it. He may play some fallout games but thats about it.

      • hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        If he downloads a lot of movies that might get annoying, but if he’s just streaming them from a Netflix app or something that’s totally doable.

        If he plays fallout idk how demanding that is to your disk, but games in general profit from faster storage. Movies usually don’t as much.

        If he plays a lot of AAA games that are bigger, his drive will get crowded real quick with 256gb. If it’s just a few fallout games, he will be fine I think.

        That said, 256gb is on the lower end of modern notebook hardware FYI, even on SSDs.

  • AlphaOmega@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    Years ago when I worked in IT, HP were the worst computers ever made. Maybe consider looking at Asus or Lenovo. It’s been a while so maybe HP isn’t as completely worthless as they were before, but I still don’t trust them

    • hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      Asus sounds good.

      Also heard and have seen it from HP work notebooks, wouldn’t wanna buy them now.

      Also older Acer or Lenovo laptops used to have a bunch of bloatware on there. Idk if that changed significantly. I do have to say, think pads haven’t let me down though.

    • mipadaitu@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      A hard disk uses spinning magnetic disks to store data.

      An SSD uses flash memory to store data.

      Since it doesn’t have moving parts, it can access the data faster and with fewer parts.

      At current prices an SSD is more expensive for the same size storage, but most people don’t need 10TB on their laptop.

      • neidu3@sh.itjust.works
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        6 days ago

        Nervously glancing over at the stack of Exos 10TB drives I have as leftovers after upgrading a storage cluster to use 18TB drives

      • SolOrion@sh.itjust.works
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        6 days ago

        The lack of moving parts also makes SSDs drastically more drop resistant, and just generally less likely to die on you randomly. Not that they can’t, it’s just less common.