Counter Productive to have both SSD and Regular HD together?

[deathtotoasters]

I have a unibody 17" MBP with 8 GB ram. It currently has a 500 GB drive in.

I know the reasons for switching to a SSD. I have wanted to for a very long time.

I always have at least 7-10 programs open including Vmware and I am always waiting for something to do it's thing. So I have wanted to switch to a SSD, BUT the size of the SSD's are just not there yet for me.

With the amount of videos, docs, pics, etc I have on my computer, it takes up ALOT of space.

So I was thinking about 3 different resolutions.

1) get two large SSD drives and RAID 0 them in the MBP. I have not really seen any articles, posts, etc, on anyone doing this yet. So I don't know how OSX feels about it. Does it work well just like regular platter drives?
Even then 320 GB would be the most I would get from 2 Intel SSD drives.

2) Use a combo of an SSD for the main (program) drive and then keep the 500 gb in the MBP for storage of video files, itunes, docs, pics, music, etc.

Questions being, would I see any improvement of having the SSD inside if I continue to use the platter drive for storage?

3) just wait till large SSD drives come out......not my personal choice.


Any advice or suggestions would be great.

Thanks!

 

[MikeyTree]

Get thee to this thread!

The short version: a combination of a SSD as your boot drive and a large HDD for storage works well. A SSD isn't any faster than a HDD at reading or writing large files anyway. The people who have done this upgrade report having substantial speed increases for booting up and running most programs.

 

[deathtotoasters]

Get thee to this thread!

The short version: a combination of a SSD as your boot drive and a large HDD for storage works well. A SSD isn't any faster than a HDD at reading or writing large files anyway. The people who have done this upgrade report having substantial speed increases for booting up and running most programs.

Saw that thread and got about 3 pages into it and thought it was just a 'how to' thread....I will read the rest of it.

Thanks!

 

[Macshroomer]

Saw that thread and got about 3 pages into it and thought it was just a 'how to' thread....I will read the rest of it.

Thanks!

I did the same thing. Then I did as I usually do with threads that size and went to the most recent post. It is, without a doubt the most comprehensive thread on this topic. I am building my monster tomorrow....

 

[mikes70mustang]

Just get a SSD and an external with Firewire800 or esata since you said it takes so much room. If your not working on something then it makes no sense to store it on you HDD if you wont touch it for a few weeks

 

[Gabriel GR]

Personally I don't like keeping a lot of files in my laptop. So once a month I transfer stuff I don't use to my NAS and a small portable HDD.

I think that the 160GB intel drive by itself is all the performance someone needs, unless you require a lot of IOPS (probably more than a laptop user needs) in which case you could RAID 2 of them.

Depending on your need for an optical drive I would recommend either getting a 160GB intel SSD as your main drive or getting a 80gb one as your boot/apps drive and a large HDD in the superdrive compartment.

 

[coast1ja]

I would get a 30 or 60gb SSD and keep a larger HDD for storage. Put all of the programs and the OS on the SSD and just use the HDD for general storage of files. This will give you the speed you are looking for in a SSD, with the capacity of the HDD.

 

[deathtotoasters]

Well here is the plan I made for the mod. Comments are welcome and appreciated!

https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/8939234/