You'll want a fast boot drive to complete the trifecta of principal specs. Nowadays, this means configuring a laptop with a solid-state drive (SSD), which can access data much faster than older spinning drives. Indeed, no modern video-editing laptop will have anything but an SSD for a boot drive. For everyday computing, the speed difference between an SSD and a spinning-platter hard drive is vast, since an SSD's main skill is decreasing boot times and making apps load faster. These factors are essential for video editing (loading editing applications can take some time if you tend to edit under pressure), and an SSD will also offer noticeable speed gains on specialized tasks such as playing back multiple clips at once or working with 4K footage. If you can't afford a single roomy multi-terabyte SSD in your editing rig, ideally you want a spacious hard drive (for mass storage) in addition to a speedy SSD. But since the cost of built-in SSDs skyrockets at capacities above 2TB, it could be more cost-effective to make sure your laptop has a Thunderbolt 3 or Thunderbolt 4 connection to enable a link to a fast external drive where you'll store most of your footage. That said, some larger workstation and gaming machines can offer two drives (an SSD boot drive, plus a roomy platter-based hard drive), and if you're in the market for a big machine, this is an ideal video editors' arrangement: both speed and mass storage at your disposal, without external-drive hassles. When assessing SSDs, know that most machines relevant for video editing have moved toward SSDs using the PCI Express bus (often associated with the term "NVMe," for a protocol that affords faster data transfers than ever). These are faster than drives that use the older SATA interface, which are less common in midrange and high-end laptops than they used to be. (See our favorite internal SSDs.)