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Is buying a fairly used hp 500gb laptop with a mechanical hard drive a terrible mistake now?
A laptop vendor in Ikeja offered me a very clean used HP laptop for 90,000 Naira. He heavily emphasized that it is an hp 500gb laptop highlighting the massive storage space. However I know that 500GB usually implies it is an old spinning mechanical Hard Disk Drive (HDD) rather than a modern Solid State Drive (SSD). Is buying an hp 500gb laptop with a mechanical drive going to result in agonizingly slow boot times on Windows 10? Should I demand that he replaces the 500GB HDD with a smaller 256GB SSD before paying?
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Log in to Replyjosh
3 days agoWhen a vendor in Computer Village heavily markets a device purely as an hp 500gb laptop it is a massive red flag that they are trying to sell you outdated hardware using big numbers. A 500GB mechanical Hard Disk Drive (HDD) is a spinning magnetic disk technology from a decade ago. Buying a laptop with a mechanical HDD in 2024 to run Windows 10 or Windows 11 is a terrible agonizing mistake. Windows 10 constantly runs heavy background indexing and update services that will max out the read and write speeds of an old HDD at 100 percent continuously. The laptop will take three minutes to boot up applications will bounce for 30 seconds before opening and the machine will randomly freeze for minutes at a time while the disk struggles to catch up.
josh
3 days agoYou must absolutely demand that the vendor replaces the mechanical drive with a Solid State Drive (SSD) before you hand over your 90,000 Naira. Tell them you do not care about the massive 500GB storage space and would gladly trade it for a much smaller 256GB SSD. An SSD has zero moving parts and uses flash memory making it literally ten times faster than a mechanical drive. A laptop with an old 4th generation processor and a new SSD will feel significantly faster and more responsive than a laptop with a brand new 10th generation processor crippled by an old HDD. The storage drive is the absolute heartbeat of your laptops daily performance do not compromise on it.
josh
3 days agoI fell for this exact trick. The vendor said 500GB is plenty of space. I bought it and I wanted to smash the laptop against the wall because Microsoft Word took a full minute to open. I had to pay another 15k to buy an SSD.
josh
3 days agoA 256GB SSD is more than enough space for a normal office worker or student. Unless you are downloading massive 4K movies or heavy video games you will never fill up 256GB with just Word documents and PDFs.
josh
3 days agoIf the vendor refuses to swap it just walk away. There are hundreds of other shops in Ikeja that will happily sell you an upgraded laptop for the same price. Never buy a laptop with an HDD today.