June 26th saw not one, not two but three gaming laptop launch event in Malaysia. And with that, a slew of newly refreshed gaming laptop lines are now available for purchase.
But the key takeaway for the day is that in 2019, SSD storage now comes as the standard.
This is a big change that is for the better. SSDs are getting cheaper these days and there is now a need to improve storage speeds not just for gaming, but also everyday use. The old 5400rpm HDD cannot keep up with the power demands of Windows 10, which is why you might hear people wondering their old laptop models “hang” or perform slower when the de-facto OS was rolled out for free.
And this is also in line with the new generation of consoles looming next year. Both Sony’s next Playstation– or as most have start to just call it the PS5- and Microsoft’s Project Scarlett has both touted faster loading speed utilising SSDs. So it’s good that OEMs had the same idea to move to SSDs.
Now, with a leap in technology, there is a setback. SSDs are blazing fast but storage space is still a premium. With Acer, their Predator and Nitro lines have 256GB SSDs as a standard, no HDDs. ASUS, however, has an upper hand here, their ROG line for this year comes with 512GB by default. Illegear, a local laptop manufacturer specialising in custom spec laptops, also has models that comes standard with 512GB.
A Minor Setback
As such, there is an issue of storage capacity right now, as most laptops this year have half of the usual 1TB storage we’ve grown accustomed to. But there are still a few OEMs that offers HDD in the base product. Lenovo interestingly has not phased out HDDs, which is still paired up with an SSD in some of their Legion lines like the new Y540. Illegear also lets you add an HDD for your custom-spec laptop.
Of course, you can always upgrade and add the HDD, or another SSD. But for those not savvy enough to tinker or are not aware that some laptop components are upgradable, this is going to be another issue for some.
Still, it’s a minor setback if you think of the big picture. Loading times for games and other usages on PC will now be immensely faster, just because SSD is more adopted on more affordable products.
We will have to see if this is what we can expect on the next-gen consoles- fast SSDs but way smaller storage than a PS4 or Xbox One. As it stands, it’s a good time to invest in an external hard drive.