64GB Storage Enough?

[Jcx500]

So..

 

Im looking at some Acer laptops to help with remote learning. Going to join them to azure ad/ Intune. The Drives on them are only 64GB is this enough nowadays ? They will only be used for office 365 with the bare minimum local apps installed

[FragglePete]

We've had to replace all our PCs which had 64GB SSD with larger units. But, these were Domain Joined devices that create quite large local profiles thanks for OneDrive, etc. I know from a particular version of Windows 10 it holds back 7Gb of Storage to allow updates to occur without issue and you may struggle because of that.

 

Pete

[LeMarchand]

We're going for a minimum of 128 for student devices and 256 for staff and suite these days as, by the time a few updates come in that 64 doesn't seem to go far. That said, those are domain joined with full on Office + a number of other apps and the student devices are shared.

 

Just checked my personal tablet, and this has 6GB spare of 32 (some of that may be Windows.old) and my fairly sparse work convertible, which only uses 36GB. But I'm conscious of the space, so keep things clear - IME users rarely do.

 

TL;DR: Theoretically it's fine, but IRL things don't always work out that way.

[CHiLL]

We have 120GB SSDs in the majority of our desktops and we often find that the drives fill up. It's mostly either the SCCM cache or local profiles on the device, once multiple users have logged on. We'll be looking at 240GB+ on our next lot.

[Warwick_Tech]

As a rule I wouldn't use anything lower than 256 for domain machines; however I have gone to 64 for lockdown laptops as these are W10S and not domain joined

[DalekSec]

120GB min for any Windows device (Excluding signage etc.) With 64GB once you stick Windows, Office and 1 other app that's already around 40-50GB and then Windows update comes along and you're out of storage!

[Jcx500]

Thanks all , i think im going to go with 128gb drives

 

Thanks!

[FragglePete]

Thanks all , i think im going to go with 128gb drives

Thanks!

TBH, if your budget allows - go for 256Gb - it'll give you piece of mind going forward.

 

Pete

[Ditto]

TBH, if your budget allows - go for 256Gb - it'll give you piece of mind going forward.

 

Pete

I'd agree. I used to go with 128Gb, but recently, if you look at cost per Gb, 256Gb often worked out much better value for money, so for a small uplift, you significantly reduce the risk of a further upgrade and hassle in the future.

[chazzy2501]

Bigger issue is DO NOT GET EMMC storage. This is often just called solid state storage. it's an SD card running windows and is awful. a single update or virus scan and the device stops working.

 

64gb is a no (esp as it'll be emmc). The device would probably also consume 8gb for a recovery partition. as well as the other reasons above.

[psydii]

Not all EMMC is equal. We've found the recent Acer devices that shipped with Windows 10

Education Pro and 64Gb EMMC 5.1 HS400 storage to have great performance.

 

(I mean absolutely fine, not screaming fast NVME speeds, but Windows updates and software installs and crucially Page File Swapping don't cripple it like they did on slower devices)

 

https://www.sandisk.com/content/dam/sandisk-main/en_us/assets/oem/mobile/iNAND-7550-Prod-Brief_EN_US.pdf

 

 

If you run this class of machine 1:1 or use the Shared Devices profile in InTune they are fine. Shared Devices profile block OneDrive client from installing, and you can't have the users installing the Teams client. But for internet and Office (and a bit of Python) they do the job.

 

If you are ordering enough Acer (so a little birdie tells me) will allow you to customise them with NVME and more ram. For us cost was key, so we went with the base spec and never explored that option so YMMV.

[Jcx500]

Was thinking that too, we ordered some HP laptops with 64gb "SSD'S" a few years back they was crazy slow !