Time for a Hybrid SSD Hard Drive?
Note: Today, Macworld posted Mark Hattersley’s excellent article on this topic here.
If you’ve been thinking about upgrading the storage space in your laptop, have a look at the latest hybrid solid-state/hard drives. These drives combine the best feature of an SSD drive (startup and app launching speed) with the best feature of a hard drive (price/GB).
For about $120, you can get a 1TB hybrid drive from Seagate and other manufacturers. Just search for “Solid State Hybrid Drive” at Amazon or other online retailers.
These drives are the same physical size as your existing laptop hard drive, so it’s a simple job to swap it out.
Jay Nelson is the editorial director of PlanetQuark.com, and the editor and publisher of Design Tools Monthly. He’s also the author of the QuarkXPress 8 and QuarkXPress 7 training titles at Lynda.com, as well as the training videos Quark includes in the box with QuarkXPress 7 . In addition, Jay writes regularly for Macworld and Photoshop User magazines and speaks at industry events.
Hi Jay, if you own a MacBook Pro Unibody a great tip is to add an additional SSD to your existing HDD by removing the DVD drive (and making it external). If you put apps and system on the SSD and your user data (home directory) on the HDD you have the best of both worlds: Blazing fast system and an affordable large disk space.
Matthias: good tip! That’s exactly what we did here — it was a little squirrelly getting the apps and System to understand that the “data” is on the hard drive. But ultimately it worked and it’s FAST!!