News - SSD equipped notebooks account for less than 3 per cent of sales

[HEXUS]

Notebooks with HDDs look set to continue domination this year.

Read more.

[Roobubba]

I recently upgraded a very old Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo 1718 laptop (1GB RAM, Pentium 4 processor...) with a 60GB Sandisk Ultra SSD for the princely sum of about £45 from Scan... Brilliant! Just browsing the web, doing office work and so on is really nice and smooth now. I wouldn't consider a laptop purchase without an SSD in it (and wouldn't have considered this for a year or two already). If a laptop has all the other specs I want, I will factor in the cost of an SSD in its purchase - Like everyone I know who has put an SSD as the boot disk in any system, I couldn't go back to an HDD-driven machine now! Hopefully manufacturers start changing their ideas

Incidentally, I have recently put together a backup server/NAS which mitigates the need for an enormous hard disk in a laptop - as long as the content is available to stream locally over wireless N, there's no point...

[Roobubba]

The price of a MacBook Air with just a 64GB solid state drive can reach $999, while an HDD-based notebook PC at that price can boast significantly larger storage space.

... and much better specs. And a USB port. And a CD/DVD/BluRay drive. And a battery that isn't very likely to blow up in the next 3 years. The size of the SSD in the macbook air is the least of its worries

[Ulti]

Note that a lot of people do buy HDD equipped notebooks and then change out the HDD for an SSD as it's usually cheaper this way and you then get a spare HDD too!

[cheesemp]

Note that a lot of people do buy HDD equipped notebooks and then change out the HDD for an SSD as it's usually cheaper this way and you then get a spare HDD too!

Too true. I replaced a hard disk in an old fujitsu laptop I had with just a core duo in it (Thats a P4m in disguise!). Along with 1 gb upgrade to bring it to 2gb its made an old vista laptop my sister thought worth a nippy little machine that would have most i3 HDD based laptops looking slow (and thats running Win 7). Couldn't recommend buying a laptop nowadays without at least factoring in a SSD upgrade.

Its worth noting that the old laptop is only SATA 1 as well!

[crossy]

Note that a lot of people do buy HDD equipped notebooks and then change out the HDD for an SSD as it's usually cheaper this way and you then get a spare HDD too!

Very true - and it seems to be a relatively simple way to give a boost to a middling performance laptop. This month I've done HDD->SDD "downgrades" (moving to smaller SSD's) on a Dell Inspiron 1525 (running Windows7) and a Dell Latitude D620 (running Ubuntu) - both Core2Duo powered machines.
Post upgrade both are running noticably faster in just about everything. The D620 now boots in mere seconds (far faster than the more modern Windows7 laptop next to it), and the Inspiron also boots fast, but now launches MS-Office programs in about 2-3 seconds.

[AlexKitch]

Worth the money, in my opinion.

My XPS13 boots up like a rocketship. I don't even *see* the Windows 7 boot animation. Battery consumption (or lack of) is a great plus point too.

[OilSheikh]

Note that a lot of people do buy HDD equipped notebooks and then change out the HDD for an SSD as it's usually cheaper this way and you then get a spare HDD too!

... which you can sell to recoup money!

[jim]

Manufacturers are still heavily overcharging for SSDs at the moment, doesn't make economic sense to buy one with an SSD prefitted.

In due course the market will sort itself out though, I'm sure - once people start to realise how useful they are.

[SUMMONER]

I only have 3 customers that own a computer that came with an SSD from the factory, 2 x £1500+ Sony laptops and 1 x MacBook Air.

Until more laptops start shipping with mSATA ports and 128GB SSDs come down to < £50 this is not going to change.

Also manufacturers find it easier to sell a laptop that says 500GB than one that says 64GB or 128GB and is more expensive than the one with the hard drive.

SSD isn't a marketing buzz word - yet. I bet if they had called them Mega/Ultra-Drives they would be in every computer by now.

What is however happening is that more and more people are asking to have an SSD added to their old computers, I have done 6 OS transfers this month alone.

[cptwhite_uk]

Exactly, the general consumer doesn't really understand data transfer rates at the moment, only "this one has 500 Gb's but this one only have 120 Gb's...."

And when they're reading it they aren't saying Gigabytes, they're saying geee beee's

They also don't appreciate how the PC landscape is changing, cloud services and networked internet accessable storage of data heavy files, and lower/faster storage capacity locally isn't really in their mindset. This is a shift which is going to take a few years yet to become the norm.

I must confess all my data is still stored locally instead of a NAS, wireless transfer rates aren't good enough yet.

[vicar]

Have you tried hybrid drives like the Seagate Momentus XT Solid State Hybrid Drive?

It's the best of both worlds, especially when there is only one hd bay. Lots of storage and speed.

http://www.seagate.com/internal-hard...tus-xt-hybrid/

[fail_quail]

Note that a lot of people do buy HDD equipped notebooks and then change out the HDD for an SSD as it's usually cheaper this way and you then get a spare HDD too!

Yeah, had to replace my old lenovo ultraportable (x100e) with a new one recently (x121e) due to a motherboard failure.
buying the new laptop, it cost £340 for the laptop with a 320GB HDD, but they would charge an extra £240 to put a 128GB SSD in it instead. Crazy price.
I just re-used the SSD from my old laptop*, but it's still much cheaper to get the HDD version and replace it with a new SSD than get a SSD fitted at the factory...

Have you tried hybrid drives like the Seagate Momentus XT Solid State Hybrid Drive?

It's the best of both worlds, especially when there is only one hd bay. Lots of storage and speed.

I brought a 320GB(4GB flash) seagate one for my old laptop, as i was struggling a little for space with the 64GB SSD it had at the time, in the end i got fed up of the heat and noise/vibration and switched back.

I instead put in in my parent's laptop, can't say they noticed that much until a year or two later when it died from bad sectors and they had to revert to the original hdd for a few weeks whilst it went for warranty repair...
By damn they noticed then! got whined at constantly until the replacement drive arrived and was swapped over because the laptop became "infuriatingly slow"
So technophobe parents view: hybrid HDD/SSD drives are amazing! (though they didn't notice until it's gone)

*admittedly required some bodging, old laptop used 9mm drives, new one 7mm drives... I just removed half the SSD casing.

[vicar]

This new version is meant to be much better.

I am glad your parents eventually appreciated it