An ssd is a solid state drive
A hdd is a hard disk drive
You do not get an ssd hard drive, for reasons which are obvious given the above.
That said, I'd have put 256 at too expensive. Quite a large fraction of a student loan. Is the laptop your only computer? A 128 with an external hard drive might be better if so.
I like the ocz vertex. The intels are widely considered the best. However as you haven't said the laptop spec it's hard to judge what is sensible, for my old nc10 an ocz core v2 was ideal. For a decent dual core I'd probably want ocz agility or above.
Cheers