rbtree Loc: Shoreline, WA, United States

The best place to buy HDD's is direct at WD. First, send in an old or dead HDD, to get an unlimited 15% coupon. Then, join oe use Rakuten. In the fall, when WD has their best sales, Rakuten has been known to offer 15% cash back. (I'm up to $300 in cash back from all retailer participants, over the years.!!)

So, you wait for the appx $200 14 tb sales, and now you can get up to 30% more off!

My best was paying $135 for a 14 tb ext, and $230 for a 16 tb Red Pro plus $160 for their fastest 2.5" SSD--2 tb.

Me being a cheapskate, I've had lots of stuff shipped 200 miles south to a relative to save our 10.2% sales tax. I reckon I've saved over $1000 doing that (Best was the $550 I saved on my bitchin score of a EF 500 f/4 v II for $5400. Don't tell Gov Inslee......

rbtree Loc: Shoreline, WA, United States

Yes. Far better.

rbtree Loc: Shoreline, WA, United States

Precisely.... Cooling is far easier, as well.

rbtree Loc: Shoreline, WA, United States

Any number of comparison benchmarks can be found. Your laptop is prolly adequate, but latest ones, such as the one in the first post would likely out perform it by appx double....if not more.

rbtree Loc: Shoreline, WA, United States

All SSD's are dropping, and will drop up to 10% more, according to a news story I read an hour ago.

I've been trying to sell an extra one, an Adata SU800, top rated, for 180, maybe even 160 for many moons, still in a sealed package... no nibbles, even.

MJPerini

I second the suggestion of a 2TB SSD EXTERNAL for all your photos connected via Thunderbolt or at least USB -c
Your internal remains clutter free, and all your photos are in one place.

delder Loc: Maryland

Yes, on External Drives. Laptops by nature are portable and subject to rougher handling than an external HDD would be subject to. Also the possibility of sudden loss..
I try to keep ALL PHOTOS on AT LEAST 2 separate HDD's, working file and backup.
YES, I HAVE had HDD Failures with agonizing recovery process, drive on side, upside down, week long process...
Can't trust Hardware Drives, Can't Trust SSD's.....

tcthome Loc: NJ

Will do. Curious, how many cores does the cpu have?

elee950021 Loc: New York, NY

Thanks for the tip! Be well! Ed

rbtree Loc: Shoreline, WA, United States

2 copies is good, but three is best, with one off-site or in the cloud.

rbtree Loc: Shoreline, WA, United States

14cores, 20 threads:
Total Cores
14

# of Performance-cores
6

# of Efficient-cores
8

Total Threads
20

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/132228/intel-core-i712700h-processor-24m-cache-up-to-4-70-ghz.html

I'm a Ryzen guy, and run the 5950X... the 12900K has surpassed it by a bit. No reason to switch, and I won't be upgrading anytime soon, even though Zen 4 and 13th gen Intel specs sound impressive.

Klickitatdave Loc: Seattle Washington

The Dell XPS 17 with identical specs was the choice that I made in late 2021 and I can truthfully say that it is an incredible laptop for photo processing. In fact, according to several sources when I was researching what was the best laptop for photography purposes it was second only to a Mac book Pro as far as its rating. I am not totally convinced that the Mac is actually better or if it is that the difference is all that significant. I suppose if you are already deep in the Apple world the Mac might be worth the added expense. The XPS 17 is expensive but I wanted a laptop that would last, not become instantly obsolete and would do what I wanted it to do.. The 32mb of ram will handle almost any software that you can throw at it. Personally I use PS, Affinity Photo and Luminar Neo and even when I load Affinity or Luminar Neo as a plug in from PS this beast doesn't even experience any slow downs. One terabyte of SSD storage really is adequate if like others have mentioned you use external storage for storing your photos. Finally, the build quality is excellent and after over 6 months of using the Dell I have not experience any issues or annoyances. I don't have any buyers remorse so in my opinion you would not go wrong in getting this laptop.

Papou Loc: Ottawa, Canada

Thanks for your experience sharing with the xps17. It,s a lot of money and I want to keep it for long if I go that route. I had a 17 inch HP laptop with i5 that I drop from a desk... can t see the hard drive anymore....

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

If you want to save that old laptop, buy a 500GB or 1TB SSD, swap it out for the HD and load up Windows. If it works, it will be a LOT faster than with a HD, and you will either save 3K$ or have a cheap backup machine (an I5 with an SSD and a decent amount of DRAM is a capable machine). If something else is broken, put it in a case and use it as an external drive for the new machine. You can buy a 1TB for ~$100, so maybe worth a try unless your old machine suffered a broken screen or other obvious damage.

Papou Loc: Ottawa, Canada

Great idea. Any suggestions on how to retrieve the data ?