SSDs in laptops.

[didds]

I've just come across a laptop with a 100Gb SSD as its sole drive. Not surprisingly sole of course. I get the point of a "small" SDD in a desktop to speed startups and general running, because there is capacity in desktops for a second SATA drive for data handling, on a still relatively speedy bus. But what is to be gained by a small SSD with no room for a second internal HDD on a laptop? Yes, external drives are available but transfer speeds are pretty slow then.

??

didds

[Infrasonic]

You won't get it at the budget/mid range end but USB 3.1 gen 2 (10Gbps) and Thunderbolt 3 (40 Gbps for 4x) are quite common on laptops these days, and you can use faster PCIe NVMe SSD's (M.2) externally as well (with recent MB chipset support) via USB/Thunderbolt adapter cases.

Even USB 3.1 gen 1 (5Gbps) is good enough for most cases.
I've run live Linux from a decent spec USB flash drive over it without major latency issues.(No, it's not as smooth as lower latency SATA but it is perfectly useable.)

Locally installed apps are becoming less of a necessity...https://portableapps.com/apps

Certain NAS' (Synology/QNAP) and cloud services will let you mount containerized apps as well (using Docker or other alternatives).

The whole Chromebook/box business model is built on a thin client /cloud basis, with increasing ability to store locally/externally as well as offsite cloud.

[Redmires]

Could it be that the laptop in question was converted to SSD when they were relatively new (& expensive).

From 2012

Some of the 40 or 60GB drives, while higher in price per gigabyte, are available for under $100

For $100 in US, read £100 in UK.

[servodude]

I run a surface book that has about 128GB internally
Why?
- it's very portable and has great battery life
- runs windows 10 like a dream
- and the touch/pen interface is outstanding (and unique among my computers)

I use it predominantly as a portable terminal, to remote in to a few different programming PCs that are not very portable, with the added benefit that if I have a big compilation job running I can fold up the laptop and move somewhere else without affecting it.

Nothing needs to live on this laptop for very long; the space it has is big enough that it never becomes an issue, and small enough to resist the temptation not to find a proper home for the data/info/files.

So while I couldn't really call it my "main" PC it is definitely the one I use most often.

Have fun
- sd