I'm not sure that many are familiar with the option to install two hard drives in the Mac Books.
The way to do it is to get OptiBay expansion module:
http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/
EDIT: or another option suggested by Photojojo: http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other...ng/DDMB5KT1.0/
It allows you to replace the internal Optical Drive with a second 2.5" hard drive. The OptiBay package for $99 also includes an external USB2 enclosure for the built-in optical drive. That's a very smart upgrade IMO!
One of the best applications of this is that it allows you to get a cheap and small SSD drive (128GB or even 64GB) for OS, Applications, Settings and Temp Files, and add a large 640G or 750G spinning platter drive @5400 for your music files and other media content. The SSD provides significant improvement for general OS & App load times and run-time operation. The seek time and the random access speed is amazing. On the other side, it is sort of a waste to keep large music collections and other static content on SSD drives.
Having 2 drives has one more very important benefit - balancing the load. If your OS or Traktor/Ableton or any other running app needs to load a new library, or do some big caching operation or anything else, it eats a lot of I/O, with (usually) very high priority. If at the same time you need you Real Time music application to load a new audio file or access other data, it has to wait - bye, bye real time. The OS always takes precedence. With two drives, the impact is almost gone. I/O hungry OS & App operations wont impact the real-time access to the music files, and vice versa - accessing large music files will not impact the OS & App operation on the main drive. Well, it's not absolutely no impact, but pretty close.
There is one more thing to be mentioned: Power consumption with two drives. It will increase for sure! Still, if you put an SSD + a 5400 drive, it will be bearable. Both SSDs and 5400 are very economic and overall, it'd be almost as if you have a 7200 drive. Maybe a bit more, but still close.
This is great way to improve the overal stability and reliability of your setups for Music production. I think it's wort!
Cheers!
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