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Comment by UnoriginalGuy | Hacker News Reader

It both shock and disgusts me how few laptops sold have SSDs in them. Even today only the very top end and very bottom end ships with SSDs (Netbooks, and Macbook Pros respectively).

Everything in the middle is purely HDD even with SSDs offered widely for the same amount of money if you're willing to lose storage (e.g. 256 GB SSD == 1 TB HDDs).

Come on Asus, Dell, and similar. Start offering SSDs across your entire range. I should get the choice of either a smaller/faster SSD or larger/slower HDD. It isn't a premium feature and hasn't been for a long time.

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All Apple notebooks have SSDs now, not just the Pros, and they start at $999 -- not cheap, but not just the "very top end" either...

I haven't looked at Asus or Dell, but I've been shopping around for a laptop lately, and almost every one I've looked at has had the option to have SSD or a regular hard drive. Few ship with them by default, but from what I've seen it's a really common option.

Until less educated consumers value SSDs over an e-peen number like raw hard disk capacity, this is not going to change. If you don't know the virtues of SSDs, you'd choose the laptop with more space for your personal photos, videos and music.

Since people like storing stuff, capacity is often more important than boot speed.

I prefer capacity.

SSDs offer a massively improved computing experience. Boot speed is only a tiny part of that.

It is very hard to quantify exactly why SSDs are so good. You just have to use one for a while and only then try going back to a HDD based system, you'll notice immediately and it will drive you up the wall.

It is just 5ms here, 5ms there, you tab between this and that, and there is lag, you click this and there is lag, etc. With SSDs it is fluid and smooth.

It is like comparing an iPhone to an Android 2.xx device. You could just feel that it wasn't as fluid and smooth and it bugged you.

PS - Yes, Android 4.0 is as fluid and smooth as iPhones. It was just the first example I could think of.

>You just have to use one for a while and only then try going back to a HDD based system, you'll notice immediately and it will drive you up the wall.

I use one every day, work provided laptop has a SSD. It's not that big of a difference. The capacity/price on the other hand is a big difference.

It's speed in general, not just boot speed.

But it isn't speed in general. Most users open several applications and do little actually saving. Most systems now have copious memory, with GBs dedicated to cache. Windows since Vista has started even pre-caching files on a predicted need. Most file system access that does happen ends up being asynchronous.

I love my SSDs in my desktop, but the truth is that it simply doesn't make that big of a difference. Even in I/O heavy apps I quickly learned that the storage was much less of a restriction than I thought it was.

A lot of those consumers are buying $400 or $500 laptops. An SSD would probably add $100 directly to the bottom line, unfortunately.

On my most recent purchase I chose a laptop with a magnetic disk (but with a flash cache) because practically the extra cost and reduced storage didn't benefit me. And I'm an educated consumer, and it has nothing to do with "e-peens". So what now?

Last I checked educated consumers don't drive product decisions for products that aren't targeted at educated consumers or for which educated consumers are a minority.

The next generation of consoles - at least the PS4 - presumably come with a mechanical harddrive. That honestly surprised and disappointed me a bit, but I'll wait a few years, until I take the plunge anyway.

At that point, they hopefully come with SSDs by default.

Which is odd as you can install an SSD in the PS3 just fine and while it only offers a minor speed improvement (slow SATA connection) it still works.

But you're on Hacker News, surely you're only a couple clicks away from throwing your own SSD into your new laptop? That's what I did when I bought a band new non-retina MB Pro a few months ago.

My wife stores a lot of pictures on the HDD. Not a heavy I/O user, but storage one. As such it made sense to buy her a macbook with 1TB of HDD, instead of 256GB for the same money (actually I think it was more expensive).

Should have had her buy a cheap 1 TB external caddy at Amazon for $50. Makes much more sense than ruining a perfectly good laptop (and paying for the privilege).

This is hilarious. "Just buy this other thing and other thing that needs more power and you have to plug in externally and add a a pound or two to your laptop bag instead of getting the internal part that does exactly what you need because I think you 'ruined' your purchase."

I just replaced the HDD in my MacBook with ANOTHER HDD. Did I just ruin your day?

She doesn't need to carry all of her pictures around 24/7. Plus two pounds is a very unrealistic estimate, closer to 0.5 pounds.

Your laptop is ruined because essentially you've chosen to replace one of the largest performance improvements since I've been using computers with more capacity which is light, cheap, and easily obtainable externally.

It is like intentionally replacing your laptop with one from five years ago just because that offered more capacity, it is crazy...

You need an external[1] as well as the internal; so you may as well get a cheap huge external (where capacity is important) and a fast internal (where speed is noticeable).

> You need an external

No you don't, there are backup options that are not external drives. You do however have to carry around extra hardware if your data has to be on it because you picked a smaller, more expensive internal. The performance improvements to a SSD are just not needed by everyone.

It actually disgusts you? I think you might want to spend your emotions more cautiously.

I don't quite understand the argument you're really making (a less polite way is to say that you sound unreasonably entitled). "Asus, Dell, and similar" aren't making SSDs. They're buying them. And yes, it is and remains a premium feature.

Entitled? I want to give them money and get a product in return. But the market isn't supplying the product I want.

I can buy it through other supply channels but this small handful of companies are intentionally sitting in innovative new technology so they can sell you it at a massive markup in a limited range of their "premium" products.

For example, just look at the Chromebook. Clearly it is possible to supply at a reasonable price, but yet a MORE expensive, Dell, Asus, or similar wont.

All SSD storage isn't created equal. I assume you don't mean the Pixel as an example of the reasonably priced machine. Before that you had the Acer Chromebook with a normal hard drive, and the Samsung ARM Chromebook with a tiny 16GB eMMC drive.

Any eMMC devices I've used in the past have had pitiful throughput, low iops, and random stuttering. Barely good enough for something like a tablet. Not really for a general purpose computer. Now, I haven't seen any detailed benchmarks of disk IO on the ARM Chromebook. Maybe it's got some new advanced controller that's capable of decent performance. But I'd bet that it's still far behind a high quality SATA SSD controller. And that's going to cost real money, and won't be present in a $200 device.

Why do you think that is? Could the implementation maybe, possibly... be harder than you think?

Well it's really not that hard. I mean there are engineers building Mars rovers operating millions of miles away. We can't figure out a durable, light, performance and cost effective laptop yet. But as oppose to complaining, I have plans to make the laptop of my dreams(my start-up project 2 months from now).

How would the laptop of your dreams be like? In a year or so it will be time to start thinking about getting a new one.

I actually have thought of a strategy for that as well ;). The other thing, maybe it might be time to slow down this planned obsolescence garbage and replace it with a more sustainable model.

It's one of the reasons I hope to expect the laptop take off.

Externally HDDs and SSDs are identical. Not sure what "implementation" you're referring to.

They'd just order SSDs from the exact same manufacturers that they're buying HDDs from. They put them in the same holes and attach them to the same connectors and Windows detects them just the same.

The Chromebook has 16GB of slow flash storage. It can do that because it has a very lightweight OS, and does little with the local storage. My Dell Vostro laptop, in comparison, has a magnetic drive coupled with a 32GB mSATA high-performance flash cache.

So my normal workstation laptop has a simple flash cache double the entire size of the main storage in the Chromebook.

SSDs remain expensive. They are a premium because they simply aren't worth it to many users. I'd love to have boundless, super-performance SSDs in every device but that isn't reasonable.

>>I want to give them money and get a product in return.

Then either your market analysis is better than theirs and you need to convince them starting all the SSD laptops/desktops and scrap all other ones OR fund a laptop which is made just for you because if everybody doesn't want it then Dell and elk are not betting all their money on one horse. As parent commenter said they too buy them SSDs and an SSD makes a laptop costlier and a costlier laptop puts people off especially those who don't know what is XOR gate.

>>look at the Chromebook

When you buy something from Google it's not the end of story. You keep buying from Google. Just like Android which is actually free(OS I mean). But Dell? You bought a laptop, end of story - they will provide you support for an year and that is in laptop's price already. So, a Chromebook and a Dellbook are different in this way too.

It just gives me ennui.

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