Those with SSD + Optibay

[MattBP]

I have a question regarding this setup. Considering a 120GB Vertex 3 and putting my Momentus XT in optibay (or getting a scorpio black).

I briefly had an XPS 17 before this macbook pro and it had 2 hard drives. One of the annoying quirks I noticed is that the data drive would spin down when not in use, then when something needed to be accessed there would be a 1 or 2 second delay as it spun back up. A good example of this is when I would go into my bookmarks in IE9, there would be a delay because the bookmarks were stored on the data drive that had spun down.

Do you guys find anything like this happens? If so does that not negate the entire point of having an ssd?

Let me know because I was so excited to use my first dual hard drive laptop with the XPS 17 only to find it slightly annoying.

Thanks!

 

[mulo]

i've been using your exact setup with no issues.
I store my home folder on the hdd, so thats music photos documents yada yada, never once has it spun down.

 

[fehhkk]

I can hear the HDD spinning down when I'm not accessing my data, but it's really not that big of a deal.

I'm not accessing my data all the time, so saving power by spinning down the HDD is a plus.

 

[man02195]

I have a question regarding this setup. Considering a 120GB Vertex 3 and putting my Momentus XT in optibay (or getting a scorpio black).

I briefly had an XPS 17 before this macbook pro and it had 2 hard drives. One of the annoying quirks I noticed is that the data drive would spin down when not in use, then when something needed to be accessed there would be a 1 or 2 second delay as it spun back up. A good example of this is when I would go into my bookmarks in IE9, there would be a delay because the bookmarks were stored on the data drive that had spun down.

Do you guys find anything like this happens? If so does that not negate the entire point of having an ssd?

Let me know because I was so excited to use my first dual hard drive laptop with the XPS 17 only to find it slightly annoying.

Thanks!

not sure if this would interest you, but an option is to keep most of your data on ssd, but put iphoto data and itunes data on hdd, so when you're not using those programs, you can unmount the hdd so it's not consuming battery.

 

[MattBP]

I'm not too fussed about a hit on battery life so that ain't an issue. I just don't want to notice when my data drive has to spin back up.

Thanks for the replies so far

 

[terzinator]

i've been using your exact setup with no issues.
I store my home folder on the hdd, so thats music photos documents yada yada, never once has it spun down.

Is it as simple as dragging the "Users" folder over to the optibay HDD? (Which I'm guessing will show up in the sidebar under "DEVICES"... right?)

 

[dailo]

By putting the momentus in the optibay aren't you afraid that the drive has a high chance of failure since SMS won't work in the optibay.

 

[DesmoPilot]

By putting the momentus in the optibay aren't you afraid that the drive has a high chance of failure since SMS won't work in the optibay.

If the drive has its own varient of SMS (IE any non OEM Apple drive) it shouldn't matter. My co-worker has had his 500GB WD Blue in the optibay for a while now with no issues at all.

 

[movieboy23]

+1 for man02195

In my set-up, my iPhoto library is on the HDD because I don't use that program nearly as much as everything else. I also keep any and all video projects I'm editing on the optibay HDD since I'm only working on those at certain times and I want my machine to be silent and battery-efficient the rest of the time.

Yes, the secondary drive spins down when you're not using it but I appreciate that as it saves battery life. But if you don't care about your battery life being shot, then you can actually alter a terminal command and manually set the spindown time of the second drive.