Hi jrrsim Yes, Raven is portable for Uni usage, as it is quite a popular laptop model among students and it is also budget friendly high performance laptop as well. Raven weights at about 2.2KG inclusive of RAM, SSD, HDD and the built-in battery, with 15.6 inch screen and form factor. You may customize the configuration of the Raven laptop according to your own preferences to suit to your needs as well. Below is the link to our official webstore as we are currently having Back To School sales promotion until 26th January 2019.

https://store.illegear.com/high-performance...gear-raven.html

We do have another recommendation as well if you are looking into portability on laptops. Which is the ILLEGEAR Onyx model. Onyx features 15.6 inch INFINIVISION Bezel-less Technology display with 14 inch form factor of a laptop and it weights at around 1.95KG inclusive of RAM, SSD, HDD and battery as well. Below is the link to ILLEGEAR Onyx and you may learn more on the configuration of Onyx through the link given.

https://store.illegear.com/performance-acce...egear-onyx.html
Hi eevess For the first configuration, it does not have a M.2 Solid State Drive (SSD) but it has a 1TB HDD, which the Windows Operating System will be installed into it, and it also acts a storage drive as well. Every processes you perform will be in the 1TB HDD. In addition, speed of traditional HDD is known to not be as fast as SSD regarding on the read/write speed.

For the second configuration, it does has 256GB M.2 SSD and Windows OS will be installed into the SSD. The boot up speed will be faster by seconds comparing SSD to a traditional HDD. Hence, it is recommend to have SSD installed in any operating laptops and desktops. In addition, loading speed for softwares, games and rendering will be faster as well. Then, when SSD is installed, the HDD or Seagate Firecuda Solid State Hybrid Drive (SSHD) can be as a secondary storage drive, which you can use for backing up files and more.

Comparing SSHD to HDD, SSHD have better performance comparing to HDD in terms of read/write & boot up speed and reliability as well. The FireCuda SSHD 2.5-inch flash-accelerated hard drives are performance-tuned to draw less power than competitors’ offerings. Reducing power consumption and heat generation helps increase system performance and improve durability, especially when playing games and running multiple applications.