Firstly - an explanation of the lingo. A solid state drive (SSD) is a disk drive that utilises memory chips instead of the conventional hard disk drives (HDD) that uses the spinning platter and magnetic head combination. Solid state drives provide users with faster OS start-ups, low read and write latency times, longer battery life, and less heat emissions.
Right now, there are a couple of SSD-based notebooks out in the market that have a storage capacity of up to 64GB. However, users have to shell out an additional amount (around $800 dollars or more) just to have the HDD replaced into an SSD, making it an expensive addition to a notebook.
Both the Toshiba Portégé R500 and the Sony Vaio VGN-TZ18GN/X run on a Solid State Drive (SSD), have the same processing speed of 1.2GHz, come with a gigabyte of RAM, and have a Windows Experience Rating of 2.0, but that's where the similarities end and when the differences start.
