Understanding Storage

[LunanBear]

I know very little about laptops/computers so need some really basic advice please.

I bought my daughter a laptop 3 years ago, mainly for gaming. It’s a Dell G3 15-3579, Intel Core i7.

It has 128GB SSD and 1TB HDD, which to uneducated me, seemed like plenty of memory.

But no, with just a couple of games loaded (Sims 4, Ark) it says the memory is full.

On checking the system properties, the laptop says the storage on the C drive is 103GB available, 97GB used. Is this basically the SSD?

If so, what about the 1TB HDD, is this not available for downloading games onto?

Thanks

[Bruce]

g’day and welcome to the forums.

just to clarify one point upfront - storage and memory are two different things.
the laptop would have come with something like 8GB of memory and it sounds like a 128GB solid state drive and a 1TB mechanical drive.
but it could also be a hybrid drive with 128GB of SSD ‘cache’ and 1TB of storage.

lets get the complete specs.
get Speccy from here; Speccy - Download Builds

in Speccy, click File > Publish Snapshot > Copy to Clipboard > Close.
now you can paste (Ctrl+V) that link into a post.

once we know what the laptop really has inside, we’ll be better able to assist.

but to answer the question, yes - the 1TB drive can have things downloaded to it and installed onto it, but if it is not the primary drive (the C:\ drive) then you have to manually tell the game to install onto it rather than the default C:\ drive.

[Bruce]

@LunanBear - any update?

[Bruce]

closing thread