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Originally Posted by Rob

Thanks for the thoughts. I suppose it comes down to what an individual buyer considers to be budget components. I still see laptops being marketed with celeron and pentium processors.

I guess. But Celerons and Pentiums are really targeted at the ultra-low end and embedded devices these days. I'd personally say anything under £500 is still in the economy/mainstream range, £500-1000 being midrange/enthusiast and £1000+ being high end.

That to me is the bottom end. It still strikes me odd that manufacturers seem happy with these low speed HDDs and yet will otehrwise go for a reasonable spec CPU,sometimes a mobile version of a GPU rather than the embedded CPU's graphics, current networking and alls sorts,

I have an £600 i5 machine from 4 years ago with 4GB of RAM, but 100Mbps ethernet and single-band wireless - while my £600 machine from 8 years ago already had gigabit LAN and dual-band wireless.

A lot of things are actually getting worse and being cut down for economy's sake and companies are counting on average consumers not knowing enough to notice. This is especially true of laptop graphics cards, which are almost always cut-down versions of two-generations old desktop parts re-badged with the same model numbers as the latest generation.

and yet with SSD's becoming mainstream affordability, there are so few apparent options, even from manufacturers such as Dell who have previously allowed so much customisation.

Yeah it's a shame Dell don't do that customization anymore and the only direct laptop they sell with an SSD is a £1500 XPS. HP don't seem to offer customizatino on their website either but I might be looking in the wrong place.

I know for certain Dell and HP still do customized laptops, I recently bought several including specifically specifying they replace the stock HDD with an SSD on one and adding a 4G modem on the other - but that was via business channels. In both cases they even came with an additional slot for a second SSD.

The hybrid HDD/SDD generally has a slow platter hard drive, coupled with a small amount of the NAND type stuff. Effectively the solid state memory part of the drive acts as a cache and can't be sufficient to hold the relevant parts of the OS and say office to really speed up all of the loading times.

I disagree here, and to be blunt, most of the industry disagrees - both people who make drives and people who review them. There's a good reason all the manufacturers have provided just 8GB of NAND - because that's a sufficient amount for most people.

Think about it. The Windows installer is barely 3GB - that's with all optional components and a bootable Windows install on the disk as well. Office still fits on 1-2 700MB CDs depending on what package you buy. The vast majority of Windows files are not used on most startups, so the actual 'hot' area required for startup is ~2GB.

Take a look at this SSHD review:
http://techreport.com/review/25425/s...ive-reviewed/4
which shows a hybrid drive (with only have 8GB cache) improving Windows bootup speed by 102%, and coming within 1.1 seconds of a high-end 240GB SSD.

Another one that focuses solely on the laptop model:
http://techreport.com/review/24561/s...ve-reviewed/10
Shows the laptop hybrid drive coming within 0.3 seconds of a mid-range SSD and 8.8 seconds faster than the fastest laptop drive. Even when loading a 5GB+ game in addition to Windows, it outperforms the fastest desktop drive in the world, being 45% faster than a high performance 7200RPM laptop drive, and only 14% slower than an SSD.

Another different site showing SSHDs with 8GB cache coming closer to 120GB SSDs than the fastest 10,000RPM desktop drive, both for loading Windows and loading Adobe CS5:

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum...-review-7.html

Another site using replay benchmarks showing the SSHD performing between 3x and 7x faster than high end laptop drives while loading Windows, Games, Office applications and running virus scans:
http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/549...ew/index8.html

Another review, this time showing the 8GB SSHD booting Windows faster than 30GB and 60GB flash accelerators:

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/...500gb_review/8

Any new data is going to be loaded at normal HDD speeds as it needs to be recorded on the HDD that is the main store. So yes a hybrid helps but only if the user is doing a lot of repetitive stuff.

With all due respect, the professionals designing these drives know what they're doing and know a lot more than you do on the subject. Booting Windows faster, starting Office, web browsing and general productivity use are the exact usage scenario these drives were designed to be best at - and numerous independent reviews have proven they work.

On a side note, one thing I hadn't thought of yesterday: M.2 SSDs. Many modern laptops come with a dedicated slot on the motherboard for an SSD, and these are full-fat high-performance SSDs with a faster interface than ordinary ones.

If you're unwilling to 'throw away' the bundled hard drive, then adding an SSD to a HDD-equipped laptop is a good compromise. Most modern chipsets even allow you to use the SSD as hybrid cache for any hard drive. Or add a 60-120GB SSD for system, applications and games, and leave the 500GB HDD for music/movies/etc. that don't need to be read quickly. M.2 SSDs can be faster than ordinary SSDs, and don't cost a whole lot more, and almost all mid/high end laptops come with one, if not two or more of these slots.