An increasing number of laptops these days boast SSDs, but capacities are rising quite slowly. For some people, 128GB as your main drive might be enough, but if you want more, is it worth shelling out the huge fees charged by manufacturers to upgrade to a higher capacity SSD, or can you make do with alternative storage?

To find out, we ran our standard file transfer tests – first between a RAM disk and the SSD of a brand new laptop, then between a RAM disk and a variety of external storage devices. The results are in the table at the bottom of this post.

The SSD

The tidiest upgrade is to a larger internal SSD, and there’s no doubt this is also best for performance. With a single 1.5GB file, the SSD in our test MacBook Air delivered read and write speeds of 187MB/sec and 156MB/sec. More importantly (you’ll see why later), with 1.5GB of tiny files its read and write speeds were a healthy 87MB/sec and 75MB/sec.

The big problem is the hefty price of a bigger SSD, with Apple charging £250 to step up from 128GB to 256GB in its 13in MacBook Air, and Sony charging £410 for the same upgrade in the VAIO Z. That’s a lot of money.

The external hard disk

The first alternative is an external hard disk, and it’s a cost-efficient way of adding storage, particularly for files you won’t always need to hand. The winner of this month’s USB 3 hard disk Labs (issue 204, in shops now!) costs only £51 inc VAT for a 500GB drive.

In our tests with a single 1.5GB file, it achieved identical read and write speeds of 82MB/sec. With 1.5GB of tiny files this figure fell, but only to 60MB/sec read and 51MB/sec write; not as fast as an SSD, but significantly cheaper.

Of course, not all laptops have USB 3 ports – the MacBook Air being one such example. In our last USB 2 hard disk Labs, the winner achieved 32MB/sec read and 28MB/sec write speeds with a single 1.5GB file, and 26MB/sec and 12MB/sec with 1.5GB of tiny files.

The SD card

Adding external storage is cheap and fast, but if you prefer the convenience of having something you don’t have to carry around, you could make use of the SD card slot. Now, SD cards aren’t built for the kind of constant writing that you do on your main hard disk. They have a limited number of guaranteed write cycles before the card risks failing, so they’re best considered for storing files you don’t update often – a media collection, for example.

There are also several speed categories of SD cards. Look for a class rating on the packaging: this refers to its minimum non-fragmented sequential write speed. So, Class 2 will do at least 2MB/sec, and Class 10 at least 10MB/sec. To confuse matters, some manufacturers use “x” ratings that have minimum rates even higher than Class 10.

Sure enough, in the large file test a Class 10 card saw read and write speeds of 30MB/sec and 23MB/sec. For Class 6 this was 18MB/sec and 15MB/sec, while Class 4 saw 16MB/sec and 6MB/sec. You wouldn’t want to write 64GB of data regularly, but for a one-off the speeds are fine.

With small files those cards had healthy read speeds too, from 44MB/sec on Class 10 down to 20MB/sec with Class 4. But the big problem with using an SD card in this way is writing multiple small files: transferring 1.5GB of files to a Class 10 card pummelled the speed down to below 1MB/sec, and that fell even further with lower classes. If you’re going to regularly write a lot of small files, these cards are a terrible choice.

The value question

For data that will be written once and largely stay unchanged, however, does an SD card offer a value alternative to an SSD upgrade? At the kind of large capacities where it’s feasible, we found several 32GB Class 10 cards on sale for less than £40 inc VAT, and 64GB Class 10 cards at around £100. That’s for basic cards; those rated faster and with a higher number of guaranteed write cycles can cost up to several hundred pounds, so you can pick and choose to suit your needs.

You’ll need an SDXC slot for 64GB cards, and some slots don’t accept the card fully inside – on the MacBook Air it protrudes by 8mm, ripe for the snapping. But if your laptop meets the requirements, and if you’re after only a quick boost in capacity for non-critical files, the sheer convenience of being able to leave an SD card in there at all times makes it a great way to save money. And at lower capacities we really are talking pocket money.

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Lining up the systems on our test benches, though, proved just how spectacular these PCs are: SSDs, water-cooling and touchscreen fan controllers on the inside; triple monitors, adjustable mice and £400 speakers on the outside.

As well as benchmarking, I’ve spent plenty of time in the Labs taking pictures of these stunning computers. To get the full low-down on which system takes the Ultimate PC crown, you’ll have to wait until Thursday when PC Pro issue 204 hits the shelves. Until then, take a look at these pictures, try not to drool, and pick out which you’d buy if you had several thousand pounds to spare.

I wrote here about upgrading my old (and horribly unreliable, until it was repaired) MacBook Pro laptop with a solid-state drive: this was another Red Watch trick, to stop me looking at other, later, sexier MacBooks. Now, I’m carrying an HP nc4400, because it’s small enough that I can ignore pretty piano-black netbooks, and it runs Vista, which hasn’t done anything nasty to me yet and helps me to avoid buying one copy of Windows 7 per laptop… You begin to see the pattern here.

So when the iPad seemed imminent, I went back to my basic principles. I had already rescued my oldest laptop with a Compact Flash disk upgrade, after being obliged to fall back on it because it has a genuine, no-messing 9-pin serial port. Lots of switches and routers use a serial connection as part of the “I’m a brick, fix me” mode they occasionally enter: so replacing the 13GB rotating iron platter drive (c. 1997) with an 8GB solid state Compact Flash made perfect sense. However, for blog purposes this job is low on good evidence, because Tecra 8000’s put their disks inside dent-prone alloy carrier shells, so you can’t easily see what I was up to.

Which is when I came across intense substitute temptation: a data-wiped Portege 7010CT. These were the executive’s delight a decade and a half ago, coming with no CD in the main laptop and a somewhat chunky docking unit, carrying excellent speakers, a DVD drive with hardware decoder, a floppy – all the stuff you didn’t really need while actually working.

Mindful of the likely super-long-term requirement for the Tecra 8000 in switch-recovery duties, I thought: how cool would it be to have an SSD Portege? As it turns out, I was the only person to think this, because I got the whole machine for £12. That’s a whole laptop, with a wiped drive admittedly, for less than it was going to cost me to buy replacement lid hinges for my wobbly-screened nc4400. I already knew how good the quality of the parts in a Portege are because lots of them are shared with the Tecras, and I definitely wanted something I could write on – which means a good keyboard, a clear screen, longish battery life and ideally, no ability to connect to the internet whatsoever. The Portege looked ideal.

Hand on heart, when it arrived I don’t think I have seen a second-hand laptop in as good a nick. Either Toshiba were making self-healing plastics back in the nineties or this little machine has been shut up on someone’s desk, in docked mode with the screen off, for ten solid years.

With no real idea whether it would work or not I grabbed a 16GB CF card (£40, the largest expenditure) and a no-name CF to Laptop IDE adapter card for another £9. As it turned out, the hardest part was taking a pair of cutters to the “extra” pin on the adapter card – laptop drives blank off one pin, and I was left guessing which way up the adapter went.

Clearly I picked right, because when it came to taking out my very precious original retail CD of Windows 98 Second Edition, the whole machine behaved as if it had a very, very fast drive in it. Installing Windows 98 wasn’t quite the breeze I was hoping for – incredibly, Toshiba still allows you to download the NeoMagic graphic card drivers, but there are diverting listing sites that point you to other installers, and these make the Portege behave as if the LCD controller chip has had an aneurism.

Once built up, I was delighted by the two things that matter to writers above all else; battery life and keyboard quality. The little devil even connects to the net – but only on the docking station, which improves my writing no end by obliging me to stay offline while tapping away.

So no queuing for me, no applause from the Jobsworths (that is a pun – I said my writing was improving) – just a terrible sequence of ever more shakily-justified small purchases to support the revived laptop. Now I have a 6000mAh battery (four whole hours!) and I’m hunting for PCMCIA network cards, and the elusive USB key storage driver for Windows 98. That is, until I saw a Lenovo Thinkpad X100, which ticks all the same boxes as the Portege (apart from keeping off the net!). It also fits into the ‘Red Watch’ rule, because while it has an Atom-speed processor, it’s from AMD, not Intel. Could this be another way to stay out of reach of temptation?

You want the short summary? It works. And how: the machine boots in a shade over 4 seconds.

The detail is where the devil lives, of course. This wasn’t a full test, by any means – i got a recommendation from a mate and thought the risk worth taking: I wanted to extend the life of the trusty MacBook but if it turned out the whole idea was a non-starter I could always use the SSD in a more mainstream laptop, and I wanted to see if the claimed advances in flash architecture really did make the whole concept more usable. Well, that and a conversation with the guys at Overclockers who instantly categorised all the cheaper options by a four-letter word rhyming with “trap”. But then, vendors with new expensive things to sell often do that…

Anyway, the details are varied but none are that unpleasant. Getting inside a MacBook Pro is not what I would call easy: there’s three different lengths of screw, two different heads (one a Torx T6 – not often found) and a couple of stages where you find yourself levering away at a bit of bendy metal alloy, grimacing like mad waiting for the loud CRACK. One type of CRACK indicates the right bits have sprung loose; the other indicates that the touchpad might not work again.

The only action I had to take which was peculiar to my choice of SSD replacement unit, and my use of the MacBook, was in reformatting the SSD. As delivered, it’s an NTFS/MBR single partition. For the Mac I needed 2 HFS+ partitions and a GUID based partition table. Changing over a storage device is easy in theory: click on the right bits of the Disk Utility in OSX and the job’s done. In practice, doing it to a device which is really a RAID0 array internally, arbitrated by its own onboard processor, is a little bit more nerve-wracking.

But you’re reading these words so you know it worked. For Apple people, the procedure I used was to change the MacBook’s startup volume to an external bootable firewire drive that has Leopard Server on it. Then I used SuperDuper to back up the boot volume to the spare space on the external drive, did the hardware swap, SuperDuper’ed the boot partition back to the SSD, and then changed startup disk back to the internal volume again.

Part of the reason why this isn’t the basis for a whole article in the mag is that, as with our infamous printer-ink sunlight fade test, the first week of use is no guide to later weeks. What’s more, there’s a huge variability in the nature, quality, performance and even life-cycle of Flash storage – the fact that any SSD looks like a disk volume is not because they are architected that way, but rather because there’s a storage processor flipping your bits around like billy-o behind the scenes, while trying to tell you that there’s nothing to see.

So I’m going to hold on my final verdict, and give only an interim thumbs up. Battery life is better by about 30% (though the battery use meter has gone nuts, so that’s only my estimate). The palm-rest with the SSD under it is a bit warmer than it was with a hard drive. Overall performance is massively faster, and I suppose theoretically, drop resistance is hugely better too. Though I’m not testing that!

It was only last week that we took a good, hard look at Sony’s latest business-focussed ultraportable, the VGN-Z11WN/B, and now hot on its lightweight heels is Samsung’s newly refreshed X-series.

We managed to get a closer look at two models from the range, the 13.3” X360 and the 14.1” model, the X460.

The X360 is a thoroughbred rival to any of the current crop of ultraportables. Weighing in at just 1.29kg and with a feature list to embarrass Cupertino’s fruitiest of rivals, the X360 is a show-stopper. And, with prices starting at just £1299 inc VAT, it’s actually one of the more affordable models too.

The X460 might not boast the ultra-light weight of its more diminutive cousin, but that’s not to say it doesn’t impress. Unlike the X360, it manages to squeeze a DVD writer into its 32mm high, 1.85kg frame, and with an estimated asking price of just £999, it’s very reasonably priced indeed.

Even before you tilt back their impossibly slimline lids, these are two laptops which look uncommonly attractive. A glossy black strip covers one third of the lid, and is adorned with a neat Samsung logo, while the bottom two-thirds are finished in brushed aluminium. Tilt back the dainty but sturdy feeling lids and the interior continues to impress. Both the keyboard and the screen are framed by a gloss black surround which, although sure to get a little smudgy over time, looks simply fantastic.

The other thing you’ll notice is that Samsung, just like Apple, have copied Sony’s scrabble-tile keyboard. It’s a design which excites rabid dislike by some members of PC Pro’s staff, but at least in my opinion, unreasonably so. The key action is very light, but there’s a fine, positive action and, just as with the Macbook Air’s example, adopting a lighter, more delicate cadence allows for rapid, comfortable touchtyping.

Some might be a little disappointed that both the X360 and X460 displays have a mere 1,280 x 800 native resolution, but the quality on offer goes a long way towards making amends. The LED-backlit panels are supremely bright, astoundingly so in fact, and while there isn’t the desktop space afforded by the likes of Lenovo’s superb Thinkpad X300, the larger pixels help keep text nice and legible. Try tapping out a document on the bumpy confines of a packed commuter train, and you might just be rather glad that you aren’t squinting at a higher resolution display.

Both models boast the latest Intel Centrino 2 hardware, but the X360 opts for Intel’s ultra low voltage platform to help eke out its claimed 6 to 10 hours of battery life. Intel’s GS45 Express chipset is partnered with an SU9300 processor running at 1.2GHz and backed up by a suitably generous 3GB of DDR3 memory, while Intel’s GMA X4500MHD chipset deals with graphics duties. Plump for the pricier £1499 specification, and you’ll also find a generous 128GB SSD heading up proceedings, but save £200 and you can go for a mechanical 1.8” 120GB drive instead.

Samsung’s X460 also has the full Centrino 2 certification, but forgoes the low-voltage parts for a more powerful specification. The Intel GM45 chipset is partnered with a 2.26Ghz P8400 processor, 3GB DDR3 memory and a standard 250GB hard drive. And for more graphical poke than Intel’s integrated solutions can offer, Samsung have opted for an Nvidia GeForce 9300M GS chipset. For just £999, that’s a pretty impressive core specification.

And, crucially, both the X360 and X460 boast a comprehensive array of features. 802.11abgn and Bluetooth 2.0 cover the wireless side of things (there’s no sign of integrated HSDPA as yet), and there’s Gigabit Ethernet too. Security is beyond reproach thanks to fingerprint readers and TPM 1.2 hardware, but there’s also room for HDMI, VGA, 3 USB ports, ExpressCard/34, a 7-in-1 card reader and support for Samsung’s P-Dock docking stations. And, while the X460 squeezes in an internal DVD writer, the X360 comes with an external slimline USB DVD writer.

If you’ve got £1500 burning a hole in your wallet then head on over to www.laptopsdirect.co.uk and you can put in your pre-order for both the standard and the SSD-equipped X360 models. If it’s the X460 that’s whet your appetite, then you’ll just have to be a little more patient as it’s not available from retailers quite yet. Samsung have assured us that production models will be available in the next couple of weeks, so we’ll be bringing you our definitive verdict just as soon as they land in PC Pro’s labs.