As the unofficial tech support for a number of my friends, colleagues and most of my family, I’m always, *always*, asked what Laptop people should buy.

After a couple of weeks using a new machine with a Solid State Disk (SSD), my advice is fast becoming: get whatever you like the look of, but make sure it has an SSD in it if you can. Sacrifice the storage space for the speed…

Hard disk technology has been largely static for the last 10 or so years – platters spinning like super-condensed long-play records. The things that have moved along include reliability, energy consumption, storage density and the like. However… speed wise, they’ve not progressed substantially. Most consumer drives have platters that spin at 5,400 (slow) or 7,200 rotations per minute (rpm). The read/write and seek times on these disks (which determines, by and large, how fast applications respond when they need to access the disk) are limited by these spin rates.

With SSDs, there are no moving parts – we’re talking the same storage technology used in USB keys, iPods, etc. So a) read and write times are often much, MUCH, faster, b) performance doesn’t degrade over time (no platters to get worn down), c) energy consumption is reduced and d) they deliver much awesomeness. They’re totally worth the extra money if they are an option from your laptop vendor of choice… Oh, and if you get Windows 7, it’s written to take advantage of them…