[Jonathan Histed]

Thank you for your advice. I’m feeling that I may have to beef up the spec a bit – I’m only just on the edge of acceptability.

In particular – I think I will do better with a gigabyte p37 v6 laptop. (Very similar price):

NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1070 8GB
6th Gen Intel® Core™ i7 Processor
Light & Slim: Only 2.8kg, 22.5mm
UHD 3840 x 2160 IPS Display (optional)
M.2 PCIe Gen3 – Max. 2000MB/s
DDR4 2133/2400MHz – Up to 32GB
USB 3.1 Type-C – 10Gbps / 5V 3A
HDMI 2.0 – 4K at 60Hz

Similar hardware (sadly still RAM 16 G) , but contains 2x M.2 interfaces – so I can add a large (eg 1 Tbyte) fast M2 SSD , to get round the raid problem (for data files) . In addition to the one it comes with from the manufacturer of 256 G, which I envisage for OS. And the 1 TB 7,200 rpm one it ships with becomes very slow backup space.

It also has 3 x US B 3.1 (gen 1 ) ports and 1 x USB 3.1 gen 2 (type C) ports- the last being good for fast outboard storage ( sadly no thunderbolt though).