Worth getting a laptop with two SSDs or not?

[Fuzzball]

I'm working on putting together a spec for a new, high power gaming laptop and am thinking I'll go with the 17.3" Defiance. I bought my last two laptops from PCS over the past decade, and I had both set up where I had a small SSD with Windows installed (and a few Steam games), along with a second, large HDD with all my personal files and most games installed.

Nowadays it's easier and better to only use SSDs, and I was initially planning to configure my new laptop with a 250GB Samsung SSD for Windows and installed programs, and then a 2TB Samsung SSD for all my files and games. I ran this spec by a computer fixing guy I trust, and he recommended just having the single, 2TB SSD, as I can install another one down the line if I really need to.

The single 2TB SSD should be enough space for me, but I'm so used to now having computers with two drives that I just wanted to see what other people thought. Is it "less safe" to only have the one drive, in case it completely fails at some point? Or is extracting personal files from crashed computers no issue these days? The computer fixing people I know have certainly done it for me and my family before. (And I of course back things up manually to an external drive myself.)

Is there any particular reason otherwise I should get two SSDs? It's certainly quite a bit cheaper with just one.

 

[Steveyg]

Can you not just take an SSD from your current laptop and install that into the new one and have two SSD's that way?

 

[ubuysa]

Having a separate Windows SSD and a games/data SSD has a couple of advantages.

1. When reinstalling Windows you don't lose your games or data because they're on a separate drive.

2. There is a performance advantage in having two drives by reducing the queuing for the drive. The last thing you want is having read/writes by Windows queuing up being read/writes for user data.

If you're pressed for budget then a single 2TB SSD will be OK but it's not ideal.

 

[Fuzzball]

It depends what SSD the current one uses...if it's a standard SSD then it won't be possible as the Defiance only allows 2 M.2 SSDs

I don't think that will be possible, as my previous laptop was from four and half years ago and apparently was a SATA SSD, while these latest ones are NVMe. Not that I really understand what any of that means, but I'm guessing the connections into the hardware are different.

 

[Stephen M]

You can get fairly cheap caddies to hold drives, so connecting your old SSD via one of those with a USB is an option.

Agree with Ubuntu about advantages of using two drives.