SSD or similar and other drives performance question

[dpo]

I am thinking about adding an SSD or perhaps Seagate Momentus XT to my 2010 Macbook Pro 13.

Can anyone who has done this already comment on the performance benefits (if any) to a bunch of drives I already have, mainly NTFS-formatted, external 2.5" 5400rpm drives. I am presuming that the SSD/Momentus will help greatly even when I am accessing these drives.

 

[Hellhammer]

Momentus XT is a good drive for the $ but a real SSD is still much faster. What capacity do you need? Is replacing the SuperDrive with the SSD an option? Budget?

Simply put, if you're not willing to remove the SuperDrive, need decent amount of space and are on budget, the XT is your best choice as it offers big capacity for relatively low $ compared to SSD

 

[dpo]

Momentus XT is a good drive for the $ but a real SSD is still much faster. What capacity do you need? Is replacing the SuperDrive with the SSD an option? Budget?

Simply put, if you're not willing to remove the SuperDrive, need decent amount of space and are on budget, the XT is your best choice as it offers big capacity for relatively low $ compared to SSD

Yes, that's also my understanding -- but the question was whether this would also significantly speed up read/write access to other (non-SSD) drives that I have connected.

 

[Hellhammer]

Yes, that's also my understanding -- but the question was whether this would also significantly speed up read/write access to other (non-SSD) drives that I have connected.

No, it won't. They operate separately from the internal drive and the biggest bottleneck is the USB interface. When you're accessing an external, you're accessing it, literally. The internal drive won't speed up or lower the performance