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20 June 2019  Ashley S. Miller  Specialist of Customer Service Dept.
 

Summary
How to choose a suitable capacity/size when purchasing SSD? Here we will go through it step by step on the basis of different consumers' needs.



Comparing with traditional HDD, SSD has several advantages: lighter, better transfer speed,  lower power consumption and higher reliability. All these advantages make SSD become the first choice for users to improve computer performance.Once you get used a SSD in your system, you will find it is hard to return back to HDD time.

One of the most important thing we need to consider when purchasing SSD is the capacity:

SSD will not have enough space to hold system and software if the capacity is too small.

If users just make SSD to be the system disk, surplus capacity could be a waste of money.

Under this circumstance, let go back to the main question:

How to Choose a right SSD size?

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For Most Common Users

A few years ago, SSD were so expensive at the beginning. SSD only provides meager capacity between 60 GB to 128 GB to keep cost down. But with the development of SSD technology, the capacity of SSD was not limited by the cost anymore. As a result, 128 GB SSD are really leftovers.
The popular capacity for SSDs currently are 250 GB drives,  which range in actual size from 240 GB to 275 GB depending on the manufacturer. And the retail price of 256 GB SSD is about $85 to $110. It is no sense to choose a smaller capacity.  If we choose 128 GB SSD, we just can save 30% money. But get a higher price for each GB  actually.
Please choose the 250 GB SSD at least if you want to purchase SSD. 
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SSD with small capacity is not economical. And SSD with capacity less than 256 GB sometimes is not so enough for being a system disk.

Let’s take the 128 GB SSD as an example. Windows 10 needs a minimum of 20 GB  of storage to run. And we need to install other software like Office, Photoshop, etc on system disk. Besides, we need to leave enough space for Windows update. We need to know that once the used space of SSD exceeds 75%, the performance of SSD gets poorer. 

Gamer’s Choice

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If you like to play computer games and want to install some games in SSD to get a faster access time, then you may need a 500 GB. Let’s take the popular computer game Grand Theft Auto Ⅴ as an example. This game will occupy about 75 GB after installing. If you use a 512 GB SSD, system and the other software occupy about 256 GB. Then the reset 256 GB can install 3 games with similar space requirement, which can fulfill the need of daily use for gamer.

More Factor – Will SSD be the Only Drive for Storage?

If you want to make the SSD to be the only storage devices for your computer, you should carefully assess your storage needs. Besides, some computers, like Intel’s Ultrabook, are not allow to mount external disk. If you are under such situation, you should pay more attention when choosing capacity. Although we can not predict future needs precisely, it is better to choose a SSD with larger capacity according to your budget.

Conclusion

  • If you just make SSD to be the system disk, it is better to choose a 256 GB SSD at least. This is enough to save files and data that system needs.

  • If you want to install computer games in SSD, you can enlarge your budget to get a 512 GB SSD.

  • If the SSD will be the only storage device, you should carefully assess your storage needs according to your budget. Of coure, larger capacity could be better if you have a flexible budget.

Related Posts:

Knowledge of Different Partition Tables
Introduction of SSD 4K Alignment
SSD Flash Memory Introduction