A Hybrid Drive combines a normal 7200 RPM spinning drive and a Solid State Drive (SSD) in one very fast and inexpensive alternative to a straight SSD drive. A 500GB SSD costs about $1500 the hybrid drive costs $100.
Here is a comparison of two MacBook Pros. The machine on the right is my older 2.53 Ghz with 8 GB of Ram and a 500 GB 7200 Rpm SATA hard drive.
Here is a comparison of two MacBook Pros. The machine on the right is my older 2.53 Ghz with 8 GB of Ram and a 500 GB 7200 Rpm SATA hard drive.
On the left is a new 2 Ghz Core i7 QuadCore with a 500 GB Seagate Momentus 7200 RPM Hybrid drive.
It cuts start up time by about 50%.
It "learns" what you work on and keeps getting faster at opening and updating your commonly used programs. It's very cool and cost about $99.00 at Amazon.
BTW replacing a MacBook Pro hard drive takes about 5 minutes. It's very easy.
You would need to use Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper to duplicate your exiting hard drive first.
You would need to use Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper to duplicate your exiting hard drive first.
Highly recommended!
how are you finding the Momentus XT? have you had any problems with it? heard a few bad reports. The comparison itself is a bit of a flawed experiment as you are using two differently specced machines with different installs on them but ill take your word for it that the XT performs faster in day to day tasks.
ReplyDeleteSo far no problems with the Momentus XT Hybrid drive. Interestingly enough, I think you get used to speed very quickly. I son took the Hybrid for granted and needed more speed, so I removed the DVD drive and installed an SSD in it's place. OWC macsales.com sells a nice little kit with a carrier for the removed DVD drive and the hardware to secure the new SSD. I moved the OS and the applications to the SSD (120GB) and that was a major difference. Of course now I'm used to that huge speed difference and would like to install 6GB SATA SSD of at least 256 GB capacity. Thanks for your interest!
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