How much of a speed increase would I see from dual hard drives

[rdej47]

ive got a 60 gig ssd in my macbook with a 750gb 7200 rpm WD drive in the optibay and the thing is solid as hell.

battery life decreases somewhat, but the boost in load time of apps and programs on my macbook is crazy. ableton (which used to take a few min, atleast) to boot up now is less than 10 seconds... everything loaded instantiously. Rebooting is fantastic.

best money ive spent in a long time, as it extended the life of my macbook a few more years

Hey djnesquigs, do you find 60GB is enough for the OS and Apps? I really wanna do the upgrade but 120GB is to much for me so I was thinking about doing 60GB but i'm running with Traktor 2 and Maschine. I just wouldn't want to run into the issue of always having to move stuff to the storage HD because of lack of SSD space.

[amidoinitrite]

to me it seems like cost + file management + loss in battery life wouldn't be worth the little extra speed.
its always nice to have things running faster than usual, but I'm not to sure its worth it
..speaking for myself of course!

[Garygary1]

in this case, taking dj Nesquigs' route and addig a small ssd + a big slow hdd is the most cost effective way to go about speeding up your computer

[space monkey]

60 GB is too small for me. I use Adobe Suite and two major 3D software packages along with Machine/TP and to a lesser extent Ableton. 60 GB is pushing it space wise and I don't see more than a 2 year shelf life for that size as a main HD (for me anyway). SSD are now becoming more frequent options for laptop consumers and is likely a harbinger of reduced cost in the next year or so. Plus as the SSD becomes more mainstream technological bumps will become ironed out.
If you're wanting an upgrade for shits and giggles i'd say wait it out a bit. But if your performance has deteriorated with software updates and a quick fix is critical then perhaps a 60GB+HDD combo can breath new life into a laptop getting long in the tooth.

EDIT:
What are your laptop specs?

[DigitalDevil]

1) go to best buy or apple store
2) put air and mbp side by side
3) ...
4) profit!

[Nesquigs]

Yes, 60gigs is more than enough. i have all my apps/OS on the ssd, as well as some music (not much) and the rest is on the HD in the optibay... and im at maybe 50 gigs? --- not planning on putting much more on there.

ill say it again, best money ive spent. upped the ram from 2-4 gigs when i did it too.... the only thing that takes a while to load is itunes (which has a 110gig library to populate) yet traktor loads all the same songs in about a min.

do it up. its worth it. and come a yr or so when SSD tech is more mainstream and cheaper... you could prob pop a nice 250gig (or more) into it for cheap(er than now).

[discothan]

If 60GB SSD is not big enough, you might want to consider a hybrid SSD.


Seagate Momentus XT 500GB


This is a 500GB 7200 RPM HD with a 4GB NAND Flash in front of the HD.
The technology 'preloads' the most used data bits onto the flash space for faster load up times. It learns what to pre-load over time.

I was playing WoW Cataclysm on my Alienware M11x R1 with a regular 7200rpm HD. I installed on of these Momentus XT and saw a big increase in load times of the OS and the game. My FPS jumped also in game. Windows 7 went from 45sec load time to 23sec, WoW load times in busy zones was 50% faster.

I now use this M11x as my Traktor 2 laptop connected to my Denon MC6000. I have yet to 'max' out its performance. No drops, no crashes, no blips...nothing. As long as songs have already been beat-gridded, I have almost instant load of those songs onto my decks.

I can not say what increase I am getting with this hybrid SSD, since I didn't start my Traktor Pro 2 use on a normal HDD, but if my WoW play is any indication, its a huge improvement.

My Dell Alienware M11x is an Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300 w/4GB memory.
My Denon MC6000 has customized mapping that allows me to load 2 decks/2 sampler decks and 4 FX tabs w/3 FX effects each; 8 cue points and 8 48sec samples.