Tip for Dual Drive my MBP

[kousha]

Hi there,

I'm going to have a dual hard drive on my computer, with the SSD running the OS and softwares, and the HDD storing my files. I already have a 500GB 7200rpm hd that I will use as the HDD.

As for the SSD, what storage do you recommend? Do I need 120GB, or is 64GB enough? I have an early 2011 MBP.

Thanks
Kousha

 

[simonsi]

I run an early-2011 and have a 120GB Crucial M500 in the Optical bay (syncs at the full 6G speed), and run the 1TB HDD in the standard bay as it is too deep for the optical bay caddy.

On the 120GB I have the OS, Apps, Dropbox and Google Drive folders (these don't seem to allow being off the boot drive..). I run approx 60GB free (i.e. 50% used), I have my media (iTunes, iPhoto library etc) on the 1TB drive.

Speed is everything I expected (back to normal when accessing media but it really isn't a problem. I still have "put hard disks to sleep when possible" in power settings and it doesn't seem to cause a problem. When web browsing the HDD spins down and battery life goes up to close to 7hrs (and my battery is 93% of original capacity), so the current draw of the extra memory (8GB) I have has been offset back to normal and a bit better.

When I added the extra 4GB and the 1TB drive (320GB originally), battery life went down to 5-6hrs, running of the SSD has clearly pushed that way back up once the 1TB spins down.

I have run a 64GB MBA and although it typically ran 15-20GB free I had almost no media on that (same OS, Apps and cloud drive though, hence my choice of 120GB this time around.