You actually get a choice of having both SSD and HD at the same time (not sure if this is what you were implying) -- since the X230 (and 220 I believe) has an mSATA slot under the palm rest. I've got mine booting off the mSATA (128 GB running Fedora), and have the spinning disk left with the factory installed Windows 7 (plus a large partition formatted ext4 for my VMs).