Increase SSD or storage?

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Hi,
happy Easter all.

My wife has a new Lenovo Ideapad 120s with a 128 Gb SDD, with it having rather small storage is there a way of increasing storage size, like with an external card? I appreciate she could use a USB stick of some description but something like a card which is more decreet and less chance of getting lost or broken :) It has the slot for a card reader but I am unsure if this can be used?

TIA
Neil
 
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According to Lenovo's website it is only a 64GB eMMC drive internally. A MicroSD card could certainly add another 64GB but they are not very fast and are not really designed to be used as a disk drive.
 
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Hi Tim Locke, thanks,
it is definitely 128Gb SDD, so it is possible to add a micro card, could it be even larger than 64 Gb or are there limits? The OS alone already has used up about 45 Gb!

Lenovo IdeaPad 120s-11IAP Mineral Grey.
Laptop - Intel Pentium Quad Core N4200 Apollo Lake, 11.6" LED 1366 x 768 anti-glare, RAM 4GB, Intel HD Graphics 505, M.2 SSD 128GB, WiFi 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.0, 2-cell battery, Windows 10 Home 64bit
 
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This is a very different Ideapad than those shown on the Lenovo site and even Googling the exact name you supply does not find it.

As the SSD is M2 format there may be enough room to just replace that with a 256Gb one which would be the neatest solution. I have an older (?) Ideapad, about 5 years old which came with an I5 and a 500GB HDD and a 32GB M2 drive used as a cache. Mine did have enough space to replace the 32GB drive with a longer one...and I replaced the spinner with a 256Gb SSD as well.
 
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Saw a picture of the inside of one with an M2 socket. certainly looks as if there is room for a 256 Gb drive.

I believe the machine has a USB 3 port. Then a cheap enclosure and a regular 2.5" 256GB SSD would give you the stoarge BUT the machine has a small battery so you might need to run plugged in all the time or an enclosure with power. My Lenovo can just about manage an external SSD from its USB 3 port but it has a rather bigger battery than yours.
 
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You don't have to do either!

Upload all your data to OneDrive, and then use OneDrive as your primary data source.

There is a new feature in OneDrive that appears on the drop down menu when right clicking on any folder called "Free up Space". What this does is leave a pointer to every OneDrive file on your drive, so you can see everyhing that is in OneDrive, but deletes the actual data from your OneDrive folder. Anytime you need to work on a file, it is automatically downloaded to your laptop on demand and remains on your laptop until you once again give a command to "free up space" for the associated folder.

In this way, you can have "access" to 1 TB of OneDrive data on a laptop that has a very small capacity disk.

Some files you will want to keep on your laptop because they are frequently accessed. This will automatically happen as you use your computer, because the files that you use will remain on the laptop after downloading on demand from the cloud. Periodically, when the capacity of the hard drive (or ssd) nears capacity, you can selectively "free up space" to remove the data from any files that do not need to be retained on the laptop but will be retained in the cloud on OneDrive. You can see every file that is stored in the cloud on OneDrive, but the actually data for these files will only be retained on your laptop if the file has been recently used.

Once you have OneDrive installed on your laptop, and this data is mirrored on your laptop, you can select the root directory for OneDrive, and select "free up space". This command will delete almost all the data but not the pointers for all files in the OneDrive folder. As you use your computer, the most frequently used files from OneDrive will remain on your laptop, but this will be only a small fraction of all of your files in OneDrive.

You will need to have internet access to use your laptop in this fashion. If there are times you will be without internet access, you can issue a right mouse command on any folder or file to " always keep on this device". This flags the file so always be available on your laptop for later use, and accessing it will not require internet access, since these files will not need to be downloaded on demand.
 
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Hi,
happy Easter all.

My wife has a new Lenovo Ideapad 120s with a 128 Gb SDD, with it having rather small storage is there a way of increasing storage size, like with an external card? I appreciate she could use a USB stick of some description but something like a card which is more decreet and less chance of getting lost or broken :) It has the slot for a card reader but I am unsure if this can be used?

TIA
Neil

You could also get an additional External hard drive that plugs into a USB port.
 
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Hi,
happy Easter all.

My wife has a new Lenovo Ideapad 120s with a 128 Gb SDD, with it having rather small storage is there a way of increasing storage size, like with an external card? I appreciate she could use a USB stick of some description but something like a card which is more decreet and less chance of getting lost or broken :) It has the slot for a card reader but I am unsure if this can be used?

TIA
Neil
Hello Neal,
I also have a 128Gb SSD and have supplemented storage with a 32 Gb SDHC card and it works fine for me. I have moved several of the files, which I consider to be routinely used daily, from the SSD to the card. I do make it a point to frequently back up those files on an external drive for safety. I have a related concern about Win 10 using what seems like an excessive amount of disk space for system update files. Sometimes as much as 10 Gb are used for these updates and is not removed from the SSD. Anyone else experiencing this? What is a solution?
 
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Hi Tim Locke, thanks,
it is definitely 128Gb SDD, so it is possible to add a micro card, could it be even larger than 64 Gb or are there limits? The OS alone already has used up about 45 Gb!

Lenovo IdeaPad 120s-11IAP Mineral Grey.
Laptop - Intel Pentium Quad Core N4200 Apollo Lake, 11.6" LED 1366 x 768 anti-glare, RAM 4GB, Intel HD Graphics 505, M.2 SSD 128GB, WiFi 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.0, 2-cell battery, Windows 10 Home 64bit

Have you tried using the "disk cleanup" option? Go to This PC, right click your C:drive, select Properties and then select Disk Cleanup. From there you can select clean up system files and choose things like windows log files, delivery optimization, temporary files etc.. Some of those can take significant amounts of storage.
For reference my windows 10 install only takes up 27.2 gb of space.
 
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It would be great if Win 10 could be trimmed down so that those smaller drives could be updated more easily. I purchased a "Dell Deal Laptop" a couple of years ago just to get the Microsoft 10 license. I did not even unbox the laptop until I needed one to monitor the security camera at the front door of our church. The laptop needed the OS update when I turned it on for the first time. In addition to being very slow, the OS could not update because of the lack of space on the hard drive. No problem I thought; I just popped in a 32Gb SD card expecting that to solve the low space on the hard drive. That did not work. After several weeks of me occasionally trying to fix the problem by deleting everything that I could think of and allowing the SD card to be the drive that everything would be saved to, I think that the updates have been successful. We use the laptop to monitor Pandora and the camera. I usually get asked to fix the laptop each Sunday because of the update error message. What a deal?!
 
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Have you tried using the "disk cleanup" option? Go to This PC, right click your C:drive, select Properties and then select Disk Cleanup. From there you can select clean up system files and choose things like windows log files, delivery optimization, temporary files etc.. Some of those can take significant amounts of storage.
For reference my windows 10 install only takes up 27.2 gb of space.
Yes I use the Win 10 Disk Cleanup and the Disk Cleanup feature in Glary Utilities. Still have lost over 10Gb space on the SSD.
 
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Have you tried using the "disk cleanup" option? Go to This PC, right click your C:drive, select Properties and then select Disk Cleanup. From there you can select clean up system files and choose things like windows log files, delivery optimization, temporary files etc.. Some of those can take significant amounts of storage.
For reference, my windows 10 install only takes up 27.2 gb of space.
Hi Mesh24,
I ran this and it results in removing nearly 30 Gb, 5 Gb of updates and 25 Gb of windows & temporary installations, but it states that if I do I will not be able to restore to the previous version of windows?
While for the time being it would be good to free up space, but in the future it would be good to have this backup, so is there a way to sort what to keep and what to clean as is only gives x1 check box for each? If I need to restore in the future is there a way to copy these as an external backup, then delete from the laptop?
I have a new HP Pavilion with 128Gb SDD and 1TB HDD, I have looked on this one too as it is the same size OS, but the disk clean up is different and does not show the same, but has an extra tab with more options, under that it has program & features and system restore & copies, but this selection only allows to delete, so as I have the extra space on this laptop is there a way to move the older version the HDD for future if needed?
TIA
 
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Hi,
happy Easter all.

My wife has a new Lenovo Ideapad 120s with a 128 Gb SDD, with it having rather small storage is there a way of increasing storage size, like with an external card? I appreciate she could use a USB stick of some description but something like a card which is more decreet and less chance of getting lost or broken :) It has the slot for a card reader but I am unsure if this can be used?

TIA
Neil
Firstly, your 'Lenovo Ideapad 120s' is already up on hard drive capacity from its standard 64GB standard to your wife's 128GB. This laptop comes standard with 4GB of RAM and the Intel Celeron N3350 processor which has 2 cores and 2 threads and is a 1.1 GHz to 2.4 GHz turbo frequency with 2MB cache at 6W, it’s an Apollo Lake core, and it fits into BGA1296 socket type. I would personally increase the RAM to 8GB and also I would change the CPU to a ‘Mobile Pentium N4200 that has 4 cores and 4 threads and runs 1.1GHZ to 2.5GHz turbo with 2MB cache at 6W CPU but, that’s beside the point and needs all the upgrade components and is quite a job to upgrade.

Coming back to the increase in your wife’s hard disk capacity, the only way and the most efficient way that you can increase the storage on your wife's 'Lenovo Ideapad 120s' is by either by, changing the existing SSD drive to a larger capacity or using an external USB HDD or SSD drive. I personally would change the existing internal SSD drive and I would buy a larger SSD drive with more storage e.g. from the standard 128GB to a 250GB, 500Gb, 1TG or a 2TB SSD drive, whichever suits and is appropriate to you. This is a very simple procedure but, you have to open the 'Lenovo Ideapad 120s' up and replace the existing SSD drive with the new one. This is a very easy and simple procedure and every new SSD drive has its recommended cloning software e.g. Samsung has the 'Samsung Data Migration' software while Crucial recommends the 'AcronisTrueImage2018'. All these cloning software will copy the existing Windows 10 Home software that comes standard on the 'Lenovo Ideapad 120s' perfectly to boot with the new SSD drive. I would personally recommend the Samsung SSD EVO or PRO as they are the most proficient and the quickest that I've used. After you have done all this, you can also use the existing 128GB as an external drive, all you need is a SATA to USB 3.0 adaptor and the 128GB drive will be an external drive. Hope this helps
 
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you can also use the existing 128GB as an external drive, all you need is a SATA to USB 3.0 adaptor and the 128GB drive will be an external drive.

Does this work with M2 drives too?? Because that is what the TO has as internal drive
 
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M2 drives come in different lengths. On a desktop Mobo there are threaded holes at intervals to secure the different lengths. A laptop may not have those except for the first one which will be positioned for a physically small drive. Also the actual laptop my not have room for a longer M2 drive inside the case.

"The M.2 standard allows module widths of 12, 16, 22 and 30 mm, and lengths of 16, 26, 30, 38, 42, 60, 80 and 110 mm. Initial line-up of the commercially available M.2 expansion cards is 22 mm wide, with varying lengths of 30, 42, 60, 80 and 110 mm."


I have not seen an external enclosure that supports an M2 drive...which is not to say there isn't one...and there are several. Startech make one for USB3 as does Transcend.
 
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I got a 400 gb Sandisk micro Sd card for my Surface Book 2. It has the transfer rate of 100 mbs. I'm happy with it.
I use it for movies and music I use on an external USB drive.
 
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Does this work with M2 drives too?? Because that is what the TO has as internal drive
I know and yes, the M2 is no different, it can be changed to different internal drives of different capacities and/or the M2 can easily be made into a USB external drive. You can make an M2 into an external drive by getting an appropriate enclosure and plugging it into an adaptor like this one the 'USB 3.0 to mSATA + NGFF M.2 (B Key) SSD 2 in 1 Combo Adapter from ebay. You can also buy a complete case and USB enclosure that you can insert your M2 drive into like the 'USB3.0 TO M.2 NGFF SSD External Enclosure Storage Case Adapter #AU03' which are all on ebay.
 
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I got a 400 gb Sandisk micro Sd card for my Surface Book 2. It has the transfer rate of 100 mbs. I'm happy with it.
I use it for movies and music I use on an external USB drive.
Can it be formatted to NTFS? or just FAT32? As allot of micro Sd cards can't be formatted to NTFS or are very fickly to get NTFS format onto them. I just bought a 128GB (cheap) miniSD card and I can't format it to NTFS no matter what I do, through an SD adaptor, it formats to FAT32 but not NTFS, I always get an error.
 

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