Basic - Which SSD for my new laptop

[auhoman]

So just bought my first PC in probably a decade had gone Apple for a while but frankly wanted to be able do some minor gaming without selling for a 15'' Macbook Pro.

Anyways I bought the budgetish HP Gaming Laptop (guessing I'll be ridiculed for that but anyways).

HP Pavilion 15.6" Gaming Laptop Intel Core i5-8300H, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4GB GPU, 8GB RAM, 16 GB Intel Optane + 1TB HDD Storage, Windows 10, 15-cx0058wm


Anyways quite happy with the basic performance and playing games like WOW if anything at all so seems to be plenty of computer for that. However I did skip out initially on the SSD and wanted to see recommendations and what actually fits into this laptop.

If someone can point me in the direction of what a reasonably priced SSD would be that fits this laptop that would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Woomack]

I guess you have to replace HDD or Optane drive in the laptop to install SSD. For games it doesn't really matter if you pick SATA or PCIe SSD so all depends on your budget and how much space you need on the storage device. The best option is to get a smaller NVMe SSD like 250GB for OS and most common used software and additional 500GB+ SATA SSD for everything else. Other option can be to install SATA M.2 SSD as the main drive + games and keep 1TB HDD for everything else, maybe small backup of important files or something like that.
There are many options on the market. From SATA or M.2 SATA drives I like Crucial and Samsung because of long warranty and/or good support. From NVMe Samsung seems the best with long warranty and high performance.

 

[auhoman]

How do I figured out exactly what fits into my laptop? Any suggestions on a actual brand etc?

 

[Woomack]

this is what HP says:
https://support.hp.com/lt-en/document/c05997544
so not much

HDD is standard SATA 2.5" drive so can replace it with any 2.5" SATA SSD 1:1
Optane is probably (I highly doubt it's soldered on the motherboard) PCIe M.2 so can replace it with any M.2 PCIe SSD. I mean various brands described as PCIe or NVMe SSD like Samsung 960/970 EVO. There are many options on the market.

 

[Dermen]

I haven't followed the Intel Optane thing really closely. From what I understand Intel Optane is like a really fast cache drive that is supposed to help your HDD feel like an SSD. Kind of like an SSHD that has a small SSD cache in a regular HDD except Optane is supposed to be faster. Faster enough that you can use it on a sata SSD to increase it's performance even. So it seems like you have a lot of options.

Optane + Sata SSD
Sell Optane and get a Sata SSD
Sell Optane and get a NVME SSD

Size really depends on you. If it isn't your only computer and you just need a little space for a few games a 250GB should be enough. If it is your only computer and you plan to store files on it you might need 500GB-1TB.