MBP's with 2 HD's? @ Apple HQ, anything can happen...

I stumbled across the following posting on one of ComputerWorld's blogs: http://blogs.computerworld.com/the_new_macbook_pros_are_coming

The main take-away is the possibility of having MBP's with a two-hard-drive system (one SSD, the other a traditional hard-drive). It's a cool concept to think about, where the OS can be on a 32Gb SSD and the rest on a regular hard drive.

 

Well there is no way they could fit a 2nd HDD in the MBP unless they did a complete redesign. It's already a tight fit inside there.

 

I think the dual HDs is a little bogus, but the slimmer aspect as well as the overall redesign to keep the notebook cooler is legit.

 

actually, Apple can pull it off in putting two HD's in there just by removing the cd/dvd-rom drive

 

I'm just not entirely sure what the advantage here would be. It seems like an interim product. I mean it won't be that long until SSD are larger and cheaper. I think it is a fun research project at best, but not practical since they would have little time to capitalize on the R&D spent on it.

 

True, but there's simply no way that Apple could get away with removing the optical drive from the MBP.

Perhaps we'll see this in the 17" model, as a BTO option?

 

Companies are already making "hybrid hard drives", with like 256 mb of flash inside the hard drive case. I don't see why they couldn't instead put a useful amount of flash memory in there, like 16 gb or so.

 

i think it will be quite awhile before we see a MacBook Pro without an optical drive.

if they really pushed it they might just be able to get a 2nd HDD in th 17" MBP, with a slight redesign of some of the internals, and a significantly smaller battery. but it is very unlikely, and I don't think there is anyway they would do that anyway, it isn't really that logical to have more than one HDD in a notebook machine, especially if 500gb drives will be coming out soon.

what is really a joke is the entire SSD market right now, what these companies are selling isn't worth anything close to what they are offering it for, it will be fantastic once SSD's drives prices drop and actually have a very major performance boost compared to top of the line HDD's right now.

 

Nope, don't see that happening. I'm sure they fuddled around with that idea for a while.

Give 1-2 years and SSD should be an option in the MBP line. I think around the time the 128 gb units get to a decent price ($500) well see them in the pro lineup.

 

why put 2 hdd when they can just add 1 big hd. (ex 2-40gb 1-80gb)

 

Cause there isn't a 1 TB laptop hdd? (well, okay, there really aren't 500 gb laptop hard drives out yet).... But it allows 2x the space with current drive technology compared to only having the single drive.

 

Having 2 disk drives drastically improves performance. Put the operating system on one disk, and all your apps and documents on a second drive. Your apps can read/write faster without much interruption with OS read/write operations.

 

Can just add an extra memory unit onto the motherboard, I mean the SD card is capable of 32GB, and the physical size is small enough to put it onto the motherboard no? And have an extra hd to store photo music......

 

Um.. no. They're the size of hard drives.

SSD != SD/Flash memory.

 

I would sacrifice my CD/DVD burner for a 64GB SSD in an instant.

I hardly ever use the CD. When I buy new hardware, I download the drivers from the manufacturer rather than installing the older ones from the CD that came with it. Only games seem to require DVDs (for the "game" DVD), and since I can't be bothered taking the game DVD everywhere I go, I just skip those that require it.

I would be a happy user with an external USB based DVD burner at home, and an additional internal SSD for the road. The SSD would have to be a fast one though: There seem to be huge differences in speeds between different models. But the fastest ones are 100MB/s and near-zero seek time, which should speed up things quite a bit

 

You are confusing an SD card - as used in cameras and such - with a SSD drive. SSD stands for "Solid State Drive", and SSDs usually come in hard disk like form factors, like 1.8" and so on.

Both are based on flash, and the existence of 32GB SD cards makes me wonder why SSDs are not a whole lot smaller. The main difference seems to be that SD cards are much, much slower than hard disks or SSDs. They are way too slow to put an OS on them.

I thought I would put the SD card reader on my Acer to good use, and put in the fastest SD card I could get. Turned out to be way slower than the hard disk....