P50 - Single or Dual Harddisk?

I would like to purchase P50 for personal use but is confused between "SSD" and "SSD + HDD" options.

RAID is possible for the latter option though most info that I read showed that RAID is unnecessary for personal laptop.

Else, I can simply connect an external hard disk to the laptop for saving files instead.

Any advice? Thanks.

 

From playing around with the customization page, it looks like the "SSD + HDD" option just means that you'll be getting the P50 with two separate disks in the computer (say, two 500GB HDDs). It'd be a fair bit cheaper to buy the laptop with the default, single HDD and just upgrade the storage system yourself aftermarket if you're looking into that. Though personally, I wouldn't bother with RAID unless you're going for the data redundancy versions rather than the performance versions.

 

I guess that's pretty conclusive for my choice of storage then. Thank you.

How about Quadro M1000M 2GB vs M2000M 4GB?

The latter comes free with Xeon e3-1505 option at US$200, which is rather attractive since the same amount is required to upgrade to M2000M 4GB for an i7 6820HQ processor.

 

I thought RAID improves performance

 

Certain types of RAID (0, for example) improve performance at a cost of lower reliability of the system as a whole (for 0, if one disk fails, the whole thing dies). However, most are meant for data redundancy and reliability rather than speed (not that these RAIDs are slow, but the focus is different). Note that RAID stands for redundant array of independent disks, so technically speaking RAID 0 isn't actually a RAID if you think about it.

Anyway, performance-minded RAIDs aren't too useful these days, since you can easily match or beat the performance of things like RAID 0 with a single SSD.