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128gb hd enough for an ultrabook?

Posted: Wed Sep 19, 2012 7:27 pm
by hiro_pro
Cyril did a great write-up on the on the Asus Zenbook Prime UX31A. Others are talking about the macbook air. it is clear these are great new devices that allow full computer access without the weight or inconvenience of traditional offerings. in all the write-ups though, i feel like the one glaring oversight is the 128 gb hard drive. the hard drive seems to my untrained and innocent eyes to be too small. This christmas/hanukkah (the wife celebrates whichever comes first regardless of her actual faith) the wife expects to replace her lenovo t61 with an ultrabook. apparently my underweight wife is tired of carrying around her 12 lb brick of a laptop. she currently has an agility 4 256 gb hd. i just deleted the shadow copies and cleaned up what i can and she has about 180gb of info on her current laptop. she has the normal suite of software for school, all of her homework including a ton of powerpoints, no games and maybe 16 gb of music for her iphone.

my question: is it practical for her to survive with a 128 gb hd on her laptop. i would be particularly interested i hearing from anyone who has a 128 gb or smaller laptop and has used it for more than 6 months.

Re: 128gb hd enough for an ultrabook?

Posted: Wed Sep 19, 2012 7:38 pm
by MadManOriginal
I had a 120GB SSD in my desktop for about a year. Yes, it was 'enough' even with a few larger games, I just couldn't be sloppy and install whatever I want. For general productivity - OS install, office suite, some other programs I think 120GB is plenty and 'should' leave at least 40-60GB+ free.

Aside from the music, which is only 16GB, what does she have that takes up a lot of space? Because without games I'm not sure how she is getting up to 180GB. Did you clean *all* temp files and everything else that you could? Does the homework really take up a lot...make that a ton...of space? One option is to use flash drives or SD cards to supplement the SSD. If I were to get an ultrabook and had to use a 120GB drive I'd put media on an SD card for sure (along with having a safe backup copy at home.)

Re: 128gb hd enough for an ultrabook?

Posted: Wed Sep 19, 2012 8:38 pm
by TheEmrys
If no games, its possible. Just have to be brutal with pic and video management. External HD may be a very sound investment. I run a 120GiB OS/Games drive and a 1GiB secondary hd, with 3-4 games loaded. All games and most all apps are on the master drive.

Re: 128gb hd enough for an ultrabook?

Posted: Wed Sep 19, 2012 8:46 pm
by Voldenuit
Be aware that the Asus UX31A uses a proprietary SSD interface, so upgrading it in the future will be very difficult. Also, the RAM is soldered on (boo!).

If you're worried about space, consider getting a laptop with a standard 2.5" bay and a free mSATA slot (like a Lenovo Thinkpad X220 or T430s) and put a SSD in the mSATA slot.

Re: 128gb hd enough for an ultrabook?

Posted: Wed Sep 19, 2012 9:57 pm
by moriz
128GB is enough, assuming that's the only operating system on the laptop, and that your wife does not keep too much video on it.

on my old laptop, 120GB was plenty. however i found with my current macbook pro that 256 GB is just barely enough, since i have to run bootcamp as well.

Re: 128gb hd enough for an ultrabook?

Posted: Wed Sep 19, 2012 11:38 pm
by lonleyppl
It's definitely enough. I've lived with a 128GB SSD for right around a year, but I have 41.1GB free at the moment and it's stayed around that number for the past few months. I have very little music, photos and games, but run several virtual machines and store their virtual drives on my SSD. As others have said though, an external is a really good idea. I keep almost all my *.iso files (~20-30GB) on it, as well as all my media, backups of my laptop and the other various flash drives I have.

Re: 128gb hd enough for an ultrabook?

Posted: Wed Sep 19, 2012 11:49 pm
by vargis14
It has fast USB 3 ports just get a USB3 128gb flash drive or a HDD. A 128gb usb3 flash drive will give you transfer speeds sorta like this:)
Seq Read 238.4 MB/s Write 123.1 MB/s
512K Read 162.5 MB/s Write 1.296 MB/s
4k Read 6.739 MB/s Write 1.167 MB/s
Not too shabby and small enough to carry around with your ultrabook without even noticing.

Cost about 130$
Oh and you can load plenty of movie MKVs for any trip you might be taking.

Re: 128gb hd enough for an ultrabook?

Posted: Thu Sep 20, 2012 12:01 am
by Airmantharp
Hell, a USB3 hard drive is fast enough to run games off of.

Re: 128gb hd enough for an ultrabook?

Posted: Thu Sep 20, 2012 4:50 am
by yogibbear
If you are concerned... there is the 256gb upgrade.... :/ ... At a cost.

Re: 128gb hd enough for an ultrabook?

Posted: Thu Sep 20, 2012 5:33 am
by havanu
I'd say buy one with a 256gig drive.
I have a UX31E (the TN-panel version) and it's a great machine.
But HDD (and SSD) tend to fill up rather quickly, and I prefer to do maintenance once every 6 months instead of every couple of weeks or so.
Then again, I work with a lot of mediafiles, iso's, RAW files and RED footage, so my usage pattern may be atypical.

Re: 128gb hd enough for an ultrabook?

Posted: Thu Sep 20, 2012 10:47 am
by ludi
Maybe the better question is, how often and how carefully do you want to be engaging in this sort of detailed file management? It sounds like your wife probably doesn't do it, which means you'll have to, and probably quite aggressively in order to keep the disk under 128GB. So, here's a question that might help: envision her reaction the first time she tries to download another PowerPoint presentation or save a project file, and it fails due to a low diskspace error. Does she go and find some old pictures to delete, finish what she was doing, and then ask you to take a look at the machine that evening after returning home; or, does she get frustrated, click the wrong option button, and lose the last two hours' worth of work?

Re: 128gb hd enough for an ultrabook?

Posted: Thu Sep 20, 2012 12:52 pm
by Chrispy_
128GB is more than enough for most people and competitive with the competition. It sounds like she needs 256GB though, that 180GB requirement is only going to grow (exponentially, too).

I have a 128GB SSD in my laptop but I use a 64GB class-10 SD card in the card reader slot. It's a cheap way of boosting capacity for low-bandwidth files without requiring me to carry around an external drive.