Install SSD in place of optical?

It seems to me that SSD's are still a long ways off from fully replacing a laptop's primary HD. (for me I'll need a reasonably priced 500GB model) and from what I understand the greatest benefit to having an SSD is running the OS and progams on it. and considering the current price points it's somewhat of a waste to buy all that SSD space just to hold movies, pictures and music etc... so doesn't it make sense to have two drives in a computer? say a 16GB SSD for OS and then a regular 2.5in 320-500 for any storage?

I know you can buy 17in laptops with space for two drives, but (to the best of my knowledge) there are no smaller machines with that option available. I seem to recall someone running the OS off of an express card SSD but the interface between computer and slot negated any speed gained from the SSD.

I was just thinking there's got to be room inside a regular sized (15'' if not smaller) laptop for a 16GB memory module wired in like a HD. I know it'd most likely have to be engineered from the factory, BUT what are the odds of putting a frankenharddrive in the optical drive slot? or possibly making an express card SSD practical? am I the only one who sees the benefit of running a small SSD alongside a large capacity traditional disk drive?

 

If you've got a Lenovo Thinkpad or Dell Latitude made in the past couple years, they've all got modular media-bays that can support an HDD or SSD in place of an optical drive.

Lately these modular bays have held bare or near-bare optical drives with just a latch; if you can find the interposer from the HDD or SSD modules of these machines, you may be able to shoehorn an HDD or SSD into the optical drive bay of another machine.

Nobody seems to be making any more Express SSDs after the first batch of bloody slow devices. I don't think there are going to be any practical drives made - ever. I'm not too sure about the benefits of running an HDD and SSD together - for me personally, it would defeat what I consider the biggest current benefits of SSDs - lack of noise and lower power consumption.

 

of course makes perfect sense. what computer do you have? My T500 has that ability to put a second hard drive in.

PS: I'm tossing my Hard drive in a week or so for a 64GB SSD for everything mobile + my media center with 1.64TB of storage for media)

 

I have a 256 GB Supertalent SSD in place of my optical drive and I use a USB Liteon Slim DVD burner when I need to use cd's or DVD's.

 

I just have a 256GB SSD, and I have a 2TB wifi drive connected at home for when I want to watch movies. I never watch movies while on the go so and if I ever feel like it I have enough space on the 256GB for a couple. It's much more practical to me store all my music and movies on a massive 2TB sitting at home connected to the wireless network rather than carry a laptop with two drives that would eat up the battery.

 

I don't know if you can install the OS on the bay drive though. Since windows see the bay as removable. I don't know for sure.
I would switch the ssd in the internal, and the hdd for the bay.

 

cool, I might just have to try that on my old inspiron 6400.... got almost a full parts computer to go with it to test all the shoehorning on.

if you were only using the HDD for backup storage wouldn't it only spool up (and create noise and more power consumption) whenever you accessed it? which shouldn't be too often if you run your commonly used stuff on say a modest 16GB SSD. I guess it comes down to how much power does an idle HDD use compared to a spinning HDD.

 

http://newmodeus.com/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=188

So you can install a second hdd where the optical unit is on any notebook.