ssdhh
I’ve been seriously considering replacing my MacBook’s regular spinning hard drive with a fancy new SSD drive, then sticking an external case to the old 320 GB hard drive and using it as external storage. I can get away with just 32 GB on the SSD drive, more than enough for the OS and all my apps, and I would put all the other space-taking media on the spinning drive. Not a bad idea, seeing as I travel a lot with my laptop, but why isn’t the whole concept of having two drives in computers now a days, a spinning and a solid-state drive, a standard? Perhaps a hybrid SSD/Spinning drive would fit the bill.

SSDs are known for awesome reads and slow writes and the obvious advantage of not having any moving parts, so they are ideal for housing an OS and applications (any flavor of OS).  SSD’s are also dropping in price every single day, but they still can’t compete with the massive storage of regular old spinning hard drives (any computer geek will tell you this), so regular spinning hard drives are ideal for just storage. And you can buy 1TB worth of hard drive space for about $100.

Hint, hint, computer makers, start offering computers (laptops or desktops) with dual hard drives, a fast 32 GB SSD for the OS and app, and a huge spinning drive for data (music, pictures, movies, etc). This would also simplify the idea of backups, where one could run two different backup sets, which would be clearly differentiated; one is stuff and the other is apps (counting the OS as an app). Hint hint laptop makers, offer a hybrid drive in your next round of high-end laptops, people will gobble that up.