laptop HDD upgrade time...

And I dunno what to choose.
would you get a Momentus XT 500gb Hybrid for around $200 or a 750gb Momentus (but not hybrid) for around $160?

I can't decide whether the extra space is more important or the speed gains are, I really wanted to get the XT but feeling like I have to be wise with my more limited budget + sort of wondering if I'm just succumbing to less some hype and nothing particularly rational. New and exciting gadgets & all that.

Perhaps the speed increase of starting the OS and applications with worthwhile, and would make the computing experence that much more enjoyable while 500gb is plenty.

Or perhaps I'd get more use out of 750gb, being able to carry my CD collection and not be so begrudging of the space Windows 7 VM would take and still have plenty of room to edit HD video. - Perhaps 500gb is enough to do all that too (it is of course, just more leg room with 750gb).

What would you do oh wise ones?

Why did you start a new thread?

http://www.ascent.co.nz/productspecification.aspx?ItemID=388748 $118

fast enough, cheaper.

I fit everything I need in 320gb (well, 297) on my laptop. Bulk storage is what servers are for. Currently have about 60gb free, the bulk folders are music, downloads and folder with all our Microsoft ISO's and what not. Couple of VM's too.

You're rolling MacBook yes? How often do you really reboot and actually start apps? Not often I bet. Maybe better off with cheaper drive and spending the difference on more RAM?

But in saying that, after playing with a new Air last week and seeing how HOLY BALLS FAST it is with SSD....oooohhhh ahhhhhh.


(Yeah I'm not making much sense, I'm hopped up on painkillers)

Right, to answer your original question - the hybrid drive for sure.

I have an SSD on my desktop and it is awesome. Its also very small.

I am using a hybrid on this laptop and I dont notice much difference, certainly not for the price difference of $120 for a seagate black and $220 for the hybrid. win7 64 4gigs ram.

Thanks guys btw... I just re-read your post kris and I got something different out of it the first time which left me in a state of confusion as it conflicted with bob's and some random's on another forum.

I did more research into the XT, and the flash part is essentially read only - it learns what it accesses the most and chucks the most accessed 4gb into the nand. There is no caching writes into the nand which eliminates the problem of lack of TRIM support (apparently sorted in Lion). Apparently by all accounts it performs very well though for reads. The question is do I really care about opening some applications faster?

I do cold starts quite often though, not sure if my different app usage is normal or not.

The mbp has 4gb which is the max from factory though I think you can make it 6gb by 3rd party vendors (not sure if the ram is apple ram, the laptop is leased-to-own).

Currently it's in IT being re-imaged with new apps (so bummed it's out of step with 10.7 release), CS5 and god-knows what else. Been a week, hopefully no much longer.

*Just noticed your advice does conflict after all. Hmmm....

Oh yeah, pricespay says the cheapest Momentus XT is $175 while the 750gb Momentus is $150.

I think there was an article a while back which had benchmarks suggestion OSX with HFS didn't don't suffer from lack of Trim like Windows does.

It also suggested that OSX was fairly crap with SSDs period.

Not sure how valid it was though, can be tough to tell.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/apple/2010/07/01/mac-ssd-performance-trim-in-osx/7
skipped to the conclusion (of sorts).

I cant think why you would need 750 gigs of space and, if you did, why you would risk losing it all in an easily stealable bundle. That and you have already said you are short on money.

I have 500gig,
90 for OS/ personal files/ documents.
80 for backup of OS.
60 for VMs
The rest is photos and media.

Buy the standard 500 and then use the old one with a usb drive enclosure for backups and media.

Not doing so bad with money now (for a student) but still, don't wanna be reckless. Um, the 750gb is mostly bang got buck plus sometimes I process huge amounts of data. If I was do export HD in Apple Pro Res 444 codec for example that chews through space pretty quickly. So it's not so much that I want to store stuff, I just want space there if I need it without having to shuffle stuff around. But you are right it could be overkill. That said, replacing my internal HDD gives me a 250gb external and I guess a firewire800 enclosure would take care of that.

Hmmm, with that in mind, I might give the XT a go... (can't do just some boring upgrade )

On a slightly related note, my computer MB fried itself a month ago and I have finally got shiney new i7 3.44 quad on an SSD. Holy fuckballs it boots fast (win7 pro x64). From the end of post to logged in ready to an open browser must be less than 10 seconds. The only wait times are for internet connections like mail/ loading web pages.

Havent loaded photoshop/lightroom or other heavy apps yet but very happy so far. Would love a laptop with dual drive bays.

I made the switch to SSD not long ago. Got the OS and program files on the SSD with the user data on a standard HDD. And yeah, seriously quick. After upgrading my main PC I decided put an SSD in my media box as well. Very handy for being able to switch on and be watching content in a short space of time.

Yeah I have a 2tb drive with all the user files redirected to it (and game files which take up a fair bit of space these days). Even though data files are on a HDD, because the OS/ program files are not taking up disk time there's no noticeable slow down.

If you've got the money sure but.....never heard of sleep mode? I hit the remote on mine, it's up and browsing the media shares in ~10 seconds, sometimes I actually have to wait for DHCP to do its thing.

yeah media center with media remote works well for standby but I use mine so infrequently that I prefer to have it off most of the time.