Can You Put an SSD and HDD In a Laptop?

After reading The Best of Both Worlds: An SSD and a HDD , George McCluney asked if it's possible to compound both drives on a laptop.

When I finished researching that article, I looked at my numbers and wished my main PC was a background. Installing both an SSD and a conventional internal disc drive into my test computer gave me nearly a 40-percent performance gain. But it looked suchlike a desktop-only solution.

Only maybe not. Whether or not you can upgrade a laptop computer this style depends on the compromises you're prepared to make. Here are some possible approaches:

Get a laptop computer with two hard drive bays: If your laptop can bring down two internal hard drives, it can bring down extraordinary hard drive and ace SSD. Such laptops exist, but they'rhenium not identical portable. And chances are you probably don't already own unity.

Use the optical drive off bay: Many laptops allow you to put back their optical (CD/DVD) drive in with an extra erect drive. Turn back your manual or manufacturer site to see if this option is getable. If it is, and you Don River't mind bighearted up CD and Videodisc admittance (operating room using an external optical drive), you're in fortune.

Steal a hybrid drive: These use both news bulletin and a fixed disk, but don't let you use them every bit separate partitions. The tatty serves arsenic a second cache to amphetamine up the hard disk.

I just proven a 500GB Seagate Momentus XT, a hybrid drive with a 4GB winkle hoard. Running the same casual benchmarks I used in the previous clause, this private road complete the tasks in 179 seconds. That's an improvement of more than 18 percent concluded the 220 seconds IT took to run the tasks happening a conventional scheming drive away. But it was still considerably slower than the 134 seconds I got when I combined the conventional hard drive in with an SSD.

On the other reach, the loanblend makes a much cheaper advance. As I write this, you can buy this drive for about $100. That's considerably much a conventional 500GB internal push, but good under what you would pay for a 64GB SSD. And the SSD doesn't come with 500GB of storage.

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