I am looking at buying a Seagate Hybrid drive. It is 500GB 7200 RPM HD and 4GB SSD. You can make the 4GB SSD the boot drive and therefor cut your boot time in about half. So can anyone give me some instructions on doing this. I have complete backups on a Time Capsule, so that is not an issue. I am not sure how to install the new drive or how to partition the SSD as the boot drive. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Need help installing new hard drive
- Thread starter mikedgolf40505
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I am looking at buying a Seagate Hybrid drive. It is 500GB 7200 RPM HD and 4GB SSD. You can make the 4GB SSD the boot drive and therefor cut your boot time in about half. So can anyone give me some instructions on doing this. I have complete backups on a Time Capsule, so that is not an issue. I am not sure how to install the new drive or how to partition the SSD as the boot drive. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
4GB will not be enough to hold Mac OS X.
Where have you read the part about using the SSD part separately? The Momentus XT combines the SSD and HDD and it will show up as one disk.
Where have you read the part about using the SSD part separately? The Momentus XT combines the SSD and HDD and it will show up as one disk.
The momentus XT actually puts the most used files into those 4GB, and as far as I know, there is no way to change that, so you would treat it as any other replacement hard drive.
I don't mean to ask another question on top of your question but can the 4gb sad hold the entire OS? I thought the newest version of OSX was ~5-6gb?
Edit: NVM someone already replied before I posted lol
Edit: NVM someone already replied before I posted lol
I'm not sure about lion, but you can easily get SL down to 5-6GB using the custom install options, and trimming programs
But, bottom line is you'll want at to go for the 8GB range. Since nobody knows how Lion will be installed yet (download then install over or clean install) you might want that extra leeway
I didnt read the hold thread but that 4gbs is not something that you can designate to put anything in particular on...on its own it uses that bit of flash for things you access the most.
Thanks for the information
Apparently I was mistaken about using the SSD for the boot drive. I went to the Seagate site and it apparently uses it's own algorithm to determine what goes on the SSD and also controls the boot time. Supposedly these drives are faster than both HDs and SSDs, although I am not sure how they could be faster than SSDs. With that question out of the way, what do I do to install this drive properly?
Apparently I was mistaken about using the SSD for the boot drive. I went to the Seagate site and it apparently uses it's own algorithm to determine what goes on the SSD and also controls the boot time. Supposedly these drives are faster than both HDs and SSDs, although I am not sure how they could be faster than SSDs. With that question out of the way, what do I do to install this drive properly?
Where has that been stated?
Read the links I posted in my first reply. They include guides on how to do it.
Its actually not a bad way of handling it, as while OSX may be more than 4GB, only a tiny fraction of that will be read at boot or general usage. The standard install includes all of the additional cruft and applications that are a part of OSX and not used frequently.
The hard disk has no knowledge of where files are, or even what filesystem its running, it simply copies the most frequently accessed sectors of the disk into the flash memory, so it may in fact copy part of a file if not the whole file.
Also means that if in a RAID 0 array, it should still cache the most used sectors correctly across both disks and in effect act as an 8GB flash cache (or more given more disks).
That's what I'm aiming for for my laptop once I get the second 500GB disk and Optibay.
The hard disk has no knowledge of where files are, or even what filesystem its running, it simply copies the most frequently accessed sectors of the disk into the flash memory, so it may in fact copy part of a file if not the whole file.
Also means that if in a RAID 0 array, it should still cache the most used sectors correctly across both disks and in effect act as an 8GB flash cache (or more given more disks).
That's what I'm aiming for for my laptop once I get the second 500GB disk and Optibay.