Why are SSD laptops so rare and expensive?

MarkBargain

Given that 128GB Solid State Drives (SSDs) only cost £35 and are so much faster than HDDs, I find it strange that laptops still use HDDs as standard with SSD laptops costing a lot more or not being available at all many places. People often say to buy an HDD laptop and upgrade it to SSD, but what a hassle (especially moving Windows over). Come on shops...more SSD laptops please!

pappa_golf

yup , however "most" laptops only take a single drive , and the selling point is the fact that its got a 1t hard drive fitted


fit a ssd , buy a usb case to put the redundant 1t drive in and you are cooking


win 10 can be setup and run with all drivers and office on about 20g

MarkBargain

Windows 10 comes installed on my laptops HDDs though, so moving it to an SSD would be rather a hassle I suspect. It's not like they give installation DVDs like the old days.

pappa_golf

umm , type the word "clone" into this or other forums


buy a case to hold a 2.5mm hard drive from amazon/ebay , as per https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=sr_nr_p_76_0?fst=as%3Aoff&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Ausb+hard+drive+case%2Cp_76%3A419158031&keywords=usb+hard+drive+case&ie=UTF8&qid=1454013252&rnid=419157031


check thickness of old drive before ordering , place your new SSD in it and run "disk clone" on this proggy http://www.minitool.com/partition-manager/partition-wizard-home.html set it to clone from std to SSD


then turn off and fit the SSD drive in your computer


10 mins work , and not a hassle


or , do you own a pendrive?


s/load the win 10 disk on a pendrive FREE from Microsoft , and load win 10 from scratch .


https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows10


and run the dvd tool

Oblivion

I suspect there are several traditional hard drive manufacturers who are still milking the R&D costs of HDDs before SSD's come down in cost. So at a laptop production level it is still immensely cheaper to buy in and install HDDs.

I have upgraded both our Windows 7 laptops with Samsung 500GB SSDs using the Samsung supplied disc cloning software and a SATA lead. The speed transformation is amazing.

I think it only a matter of time before HDDs are museum pieces.

Inner_Zone

MarkBargain wrote: »

Windows 10 comes installed on my laptops HDDs though, so moving it to an SSD would be rather a hassle I suspect. It's not like they give installation DVDs like the old days.

Should not be, for example SanDisk offer free cloning software, just requires a USB to SATA adapter or use the Windows 10 media creation tool to create a ISO on DVD and do a fresh install.

Done one clone and two fresh installs this week alone.

motorguy

Inner_Zone wrote: »

Should not be, for example SanDisk offer free cloning software, just requires a USB to SATA adapter or use the Windows 10 media creation tool to create a ISO on DVD and do a fresh install.

Done one clone and two fresh installs this week alone.

+1

I've done a couple of installs and a clone onto SSD drive too. No issues

RobTang

I wouldn't say they are rare in fact the opposite...


Just checking my local computer store they have 395 SSD laptop SKUs vs 214 HDD laptop SKUs.
The budget spec one admittedly have tiny SSD 60-100gb but there are some nice mid range £300-£400 with 128-256gb SSDs...


The thing is they just don't sell these models in the UK, a mix of consumer demand, taxes and historical channel missteps means they are too scared to import anything but dirt cheap laptops or hipster ultrabooks / apple kit.
Anything that does make it through probably only has a 50-100 units total so your not going to find them.

Aletank

Ebay might be the best place, maybe even go for a refurbished/used deal

MarkBargain

Thanks for the info about upgrading from HDD to SSD, so perhaps not as difficult as I thought. Still, I am sure the average user would prefer to buy a laptop with an SSD in it to start with than have to do that.

Saveonlaptops have Lenovos with SSDs for a reasonable price (i3 4GB £279.97) but I think Lenovos can have rather poor keyboards, otherwise that would be a relatively good deal. Ebay laptops with SSDs mostly seem to be Lenovos around the £300 mark.

AJXX

MarkBargain wrote: »

Thanks for the info about upgrading from HDD to SSD, so perhaps not as difficult as I thought.

Generally it isn't however check specs/ease of fitting before buying the SSD (or laptop even).

I recently got an i3 HP Ultrabook off eBay for an absolute steal with the intention to use it for light web browsing, also purchased (separately) an SSD to give it an extra edge.

I've done upgrades on desktops and laptops for years, just assumed it would be a fairly easy job, but holy crap, I spent 4 hours having to turf up the bloody keyboard and half of the internals trying to swap the HDD out for the SSD - the rate expletives where flying out would have made Gordon Ramsey proud!

Worth it in the end, but at some points I thought I was going to just chuck it out the window.

On a side note, and this is likely personal preference, but if you're updating an existing PC to an SSD drive then I'd take the opportunity just to freshly install Windows rather than mess around with cloning your existing HDD.

Couple of memory sticks off eBay (32 GB's) probably end up costing less than £10.

Download Windows 10 image - use something like Rufus to image the USB stick - then boot from it and install windows.

Yes you'll have to then move data across and re-install programs, but you'll end up getting rid of an awful lot of rubbish built up over the years.