Linux model with ssd & sd cards or hdd model?

Hi guys and girls,

I will be buying of of these babys before xmas and I have seen the 8gb version for £180, also the 120gb hdd version with an extra 512mb of memory for about £220.

I'm not too worried about lots of storage space as it is only for casual/holiday use for storing photos/watching movies/listening to music/surfing/general fiddling and not for work use as I have a full sized laptop for all that.

I can get the 8gb for £180 as mentioned and for about £50 I can stick in 2 x 16gb sd cards and 512mb more memory, i understand that it costs a few quid more than the 120gb hdd version but is it a better/worthwhile option or should I buy the hdd version? Is power consumption noticeably better with solid state memory?
I also know that a 16gb ssd version with 1gb of ram will be available on December 1st (in the UK) so will wait until after that to see if the 8gb price drops

All advice greatfully appreciated.

 

I have the 8Gb SSD, and it's great for what you describe. A few days ago, I had it running with firefox and many tabs, open office docs and sheets, several pdfs, email etc open, and it only went into 8Mb worth of swap, so the 512Mb memory is fine for light to medium use as far as I'm concerned. I don't believe the power consumption between the models is particularly different, though - a forum search might reveal some threads about this. For me, the advantage of the SSD is being able to walk around with it etc without paranoia about the HDD.

You just need to make a decision about how much storage you need.

 

If you're worried about power consumption, make sure you get a model with a 6-cell battery instead of a 3-cell battery. The wikipedia page lists all the models.

 

Since you've bucked the trend and insisted on Linux, I would recommend the SSD. No need to fuss around and upgrade the memory either, 512 MB is fine. You can buy SD expansion cards later as the need arises, they'll only be getting cheaper.

Besides being cheaper, the SSD model is a fraction lighter and slimmer, and, subjectively at least, more shock resistant...