Putting a hybrid SSD drive in - Question.

[jesso]

Howdy.

I'm a bit of a newb to the idea of SSD.
I'm considering a hybrid SSD drive, or maybe a full SSD drive and moving my mechanical drive to the superdrive port (I've seen adaptors to make this possible).
My question is to do with partitioning drives.
I have a small Leopard partition on my current HD, which I use quite regularly.
I understand that a hybrid drive accesses all the OS and application data from the SSD part, but the bulk of files (media files, photos etc) stay on the mechanical bit.
If I have a partition, does that mean that each separate OS will boot from the same SSD drive? How does the drive split up the files if there are partitions? Any help would be very much appreciated.
Thanks.

 

[jesso]

Anyone? I'd love to know about this.

 

[bozz2006]

Are you talking about something like the Seagate XT? or the Crucial drive (don't remember the name.) If the former, your understanding is a little off. The hybrid drive tracks your usage and automatically caches the most used files (usually startup stuff and most-used applications). Partitions won't affect this.

If the latter, I don't know that you'd have room for more than one OS on the SSD side. You'd probably have to put your less-used OS on the hard disk.

 

[applesoundgear]

My suggestion would be to get the Momentus XT Hybrid. The newest model is 750gigs with I think 8gigs of flash memory. It's only around $150 depending where you order from, which is a really great price for something like it.

Mine came in this morning and I'm replacing my HDD with it. That would be your best bet really. Increased space with faster speeds. It's a little louder because it's a 7200rpm drive but the way it's designed makes it only slightly louder. You probably won't even notice.

 

[jesso]

Thanks for the replies.
I think for simplicities sake I will go for something like the momentus XT hybrid.
So (not sure if I have this right) the hybrid drive will store the most used files regardless of how many partitions I have?
Very clever if that's the case.

 

[LeGacY X]

If I were you I would go for a full fledged SSD for about $50 more. For around 200 dollars you can get a decent 256 GB SSD if you look around. If that's enough space for you, with a second drive in the optical bay, this is definitely the way to go as the speed increase can be immense.

 

[jesso]

If I were you I would go for a full fledged SSD for about $50 more. For around 200 dollars you can get a decent 256 GB SSD if you look around. If that's enough space for you, with a second drive in the optical bay, this is definitely the way to go as the speed increase can be immense.

Thanks for the advice.
That sounds very tempting.
So I could just put my existing drive in the optical bay and set my itunes/iphoto librarys (that's what takes up the most space) to live there?
For everything else 256 would be more than enough for me.
How would that work with time machine? Would I need to back up the drives seperately? Do both drives show up individually or are they treated as one big drive?

 

[LeGacY X]

Yep this is exactly how it would work. As for Time Machine, you can select which disks for which you want to keep backups.