Living the laptop one cable life - I think I'm done with desktops

Hades

Hades

Hades

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I've always been a desktop guy due to my gaming usage. But over the years my gaming use has reduced to the point I only really need that desktop for one or two games. I've had laptops in the past but not to replace the desktop.

I recently bought a cheap used ex-business laptop (Thinkpad T480) which came with a USBC dock included. What a revelation this is. I upgraded the laptop to 32gb RAM and two SSD's and additional extended all day battery and it runs all my non-gaming needs just fine. Being able to dock it in seconds, use it like a desktop with large monitors - but in relative silence - and then later undock it and take it to the sofa to carry on using it. Obviously I've know this for years but never actually used a laptop in this way before. It really is making me think of selling the desktop and buying a more modern laptop which can play those couple of games too.

I can see why desktop usage is declining.
 
Plugging my laptop in to the monitor with USBC to get display and charging still feels quite great, and my laptop is ancient (in IT terms).
I can also see the appeal of just binning the desktop off and getting a laptop that can run a little bit more.
 
hornetstinger said:
Or get a mini pc
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I've been kind of tempted to move a lot of stuff over to a mini PC for general use - but I still dip in and out of heavy weight packages a bit too much it would be a faff swapping back and forth from my main PC as needed and I'm not desperately feeling the electricity bill... yet... Some of the cheaper mini PCs have reasonable performance/specs (J4125 or N5105 CPU w/ 8GB RAM and 128-512GB storage) for general desktop stuff while only using 3-4 watt or less average and come up on deals quite a bit.

If it was a 1 cable deal I'd probably use my laptop (10870H w/ 3070 not the one in my sig) more instead of my main PC.

Though the other deal breaker for me with both of those options is Windows 10/11 which is far too disruptive on my usage compared to 7.
 
I'm about to try to switch my desktop to an Asus PN51 with Ryzen 7 5700U CPU which I suspect is more what @hornetstinger meant by mini PC than the SoC devices. Problem is I have one application that needs a discrete GPU for certain functions so will still need the big desktop on occasions.
 
Snapshot said:
I'm about to try to switch my desktop to an Asus PN51 with Ryzen 7 5700U CPU which I suspect is more what @hornetstinger meant by mini PC than the SoC devices. Problem is I have one application that needs a discrete GPU for certain functions so will still need the big desktop on occasions.
Click to expand...

That Asus isn't cheap! Also I'd want a 3.5" HDD rather than 2.5" (better value) I'd still have option for 2.5" in 3.5" caddy
 
hornetstinger said:
That Asus isn't cheap! Also I'd want a 3.5" HDD rather than 2.5" (better value) I'd still have option for 2.5" in 3.5" caddy
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No, it’s not cheap. It is extremely good though. And TINY. A 2.5” drive barely fits.

And would you honestly shackle a 5700U with a magnetic storage drive? Even as the second local disk? The user experience would be like accessing the cloud.
 
hornetstinger said:
Nvme for boot and 3.5" for mass storage
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I understand and even over SATA for ‘mass storage’ an SSD will be noticeably more responsive and faster than a magnetic drive.

You can’t get away from the fact that it’s a 640Mb connection at best (and a magnetic drive isn’t the best option) and even your LAN connection will be faster than that. As I said above a LAN connection to a NAS with an SSD buffer cache will almost certainly be faster than a locally connected SATA magnetic hard drive. I wouldn’t reduce my user experience for the sake of buying a ‘value’ hard drive. But that’s just me.
 
WJA96 said:
and even your LAN connection will be faster than that.
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Depends on access patterns - most modern HDDs will have sustained read and write speeds with medium to large files slightly above gigabit LAN speed (unless using 2.5+Gbps LAN) while stuff like mixed read/write and small file speeds will be far lower. Even some NVMEs can drop below gigabit LAN speeds for mixed random small file performance though - albeit still 10-40 plus times faster than a mechanical drive.

Even then though I recently moved one of my NAS setups from 4 disc HDD RAID (both redundancy and performance) to an NVME drive + real time replication to a secondary mechanical backup and the difference in response is noticeable over the LAN - opening things like folders with a large number of images with thumbnails enabled is massively faster.
 
WJA96 said:
I understand and even over SATA for ‘mass storage’ an SSD will be noticeably more responsive and faster than a magnetic drive.

You can’t get away from the fact that it’s a 640Mb connection at best (and a magnetic drive isn’t the best option) and even your LAN connection will be faster than that. As I said above a LAN connection to a NAS with an SSD buffer cache will almost certainly be faster than a locally connected SATA magnetic hard drive. I wouldn’t reduce my user experience for the sake of buying a ‘value’ hard drive. But that’s just me.
Click to expand...


If you want to buy me 20tb SSD then you can simply forward money into my bank account.

Also it's mass storage not mass speed. So you need 5000gb sec read rate for flac, mkv files?
 
hornetstinger said:
If you want to buy me 20tb SSD then you can simply forward money into my bank account.

Also it's mass storage not mass speed. So you need 5000gb sec read rate for flac, mkv files?
Click to expand...

When we install the fabric for Linn systems installers we put in fibre optic cable for 10GbE+ transfers because yes, they don‘t want the user to have to wait for the file to hit the player. Even if that file is only 20Mb. You need SSDs more for FLACs because you want high sequential read speeds. You’ve made your mind up. You’re going to economise and you’re prepared to wait. I disagree.
 
WJA96 said:
When we install the fabric for Linn systems installers we put in fibre optic cable for 10GbE+ transfers because yes, they don‘t want the user to have to wait for the file to hit the player. Even if that file is only 20Mb. You need SSDs more for FLACs because you want high sequential read speeds. You’ve made your mind up. You’re going to economise and you’re prepared to wait. I disagree.
Click to expand...

oh deary me.

Even a 5400 rpm 2.5" LAPTOP drive can read in flac files with plenty of read speed as headroom.
 
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12x more expensive for storing flac files, where a whole flac file is read in 1/6th of a second. Brillaint idea.
 
You can be as dismissive as you like. You’re fully entitled to your opinion and I disagree. You’ve made your point. Slow magnetic hard drives are cheaper than fast SSDs. That’s true. As a user experience they’re horrible, even as local data storage drives. They just are. That’s why people stopped using them for that. SSDs are just better for everything except £/Gb.
 
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