Paul wrote:
Bill in Co wrote:


So let me get this straight: Any laptop out there (thin or not) that
has an SSD drive means the drive is not serviceable, and is simply
soldered in? If so, I feel that is really bad news. I think that might
prevent me
from buying one with an SSD, despite the fast boot. Kinda a high
stakes gamble, that option is.

The machines that are thick enough to have a fan, are thick
enough to have an SSD drive bay.

When the machines get really thin, there's no room for a
7mm SSD plus plastic covering on both sides.

The thinnest you can make a device, is two plastic surfaces
and a printed circuit board of some sort. And the eMMC storage
is just another chip soldered to the board. A BGA with a
relatively small ball count.

A PCH (Southbridge) could have a thousand balls, while
an eMMC flash drive might have 48 or 64, somewhere in that
ballpark. The eMMC drive isn't particularly demanding,
and it probably could have been put in a TSOP instead
of a BGA. Again, it's almost like the BGA was chosen
purely to make it harder to remove. (Yes, BGAs have
a smaller footprint, but repair-ability matters too.)

Due to the multi-layer nature of commodity flash now
(96L came out a few days ago), you can actually put
much more storage than 32GB in one "chip". The "chip"
is a stack of thinned wafers of "stuff", joined somehow
vertically. They could probably do more than 128GB
in a single chip now. But you'll continue to see stupid
designs with only 32GB being the "median" offering. 32GB,
once you consider the "overheads", doesn't give a lot of
room. The "OS people" could easily benefit from having
their "own drive" and a second chip should really be
there for users. A "hard partition" to prevent the OS
from doing stupid stuff. For example, a new feature
introduced a few days ago, mentions the OS is going to
"reserve" somehow, around 7GB of space, so it can
download a new version of Windows 10 and be guaranteed
of being able to store it. With that sort of notion,
it would be better if the hardware just gave them their
own chip to use.

In any case, I hope that gives you some "danger signs"
to look for in adverts.

Paul

Thanks. Definitely something to keep track of. I'm thinking those 32 GB
SSD laptops must not have a ton of room left over,too.

OK, I just looked this up, and one site says for system requirements 16 GB
for 32 bit, 20 GB for 64 bit. I didn't even know there was a 32 bit option
for Windows 10, but I guess that was for folks doing upgrades from an older
32 bit OS, as I can't see any other reason for it, except, perhaps, for
backwards compatibility with some older 32 bit programs. I almost forgot
about that one.

But wow, about 20 GB already used, leaving you only 12 GB for everything
else? Wow. That will be a "little bit" tight if you have any decent
collection of programs.