Pairing SSD with SD

Hey, I am a new member but really appreciate all of the great info I have gleaned while lurking in the shadows!

I am an unreformed deal-a-holic. I just bought a lenovo z370 with i5 for $480 as a Fry's one day special. I hope to have a long and happy experience with this machine, so I am "making it mine" by increasing memory from 4 to 8 GB and adding a SSD.

I will use it for surfing the net, stream hulu and netflix, office, and CAD/CAM (but don't read too much into that - as of about 5 years ago I found about any average hardware would perform well for my needs).

My current notebook has about 57 GB on the hard drive and I can't think of anything I might add to increase that. So a 96GB drive seems like a good fit Frys is selling the 96GB Kingston SSDnow V+100 for $97 after $65 rebate. Not the fastest, but should provide a noticeable speed increase, cooler running (less fan - quieter), and longer battery life.

However, the chance of eventually crowding the drive is worrying me.

What I hope to establish from you is if it is reasonable to simply plug in a 32GB SD Card and use it to offload data from the SSD should it come to that. If so, what type of data would be best to move to the SD Card?

I could find discussion of this on the internet, but everything was from 2007 or 2008.


Thanks for your helpful advise!

 

SD cards are relatively slow, so move anything you rarely use to there

Even better, get yourself a cheap 2.5" 320GB+ USB hard drive to put your stuff on.

 

Yea as namaiki said, it can be done, but SD/CF/etc cards are all slow. They are not SSD speed, not even HDD speed, not even close. We are talking a handful of MB/s read/write speeds usually, rarely more than a couple dozen.

An external is best unless you replace the optical drive with a caddy and stick a 2.5" drive in there. (Not sure if that model even can do this, but many models can). I do wonder about the durability of those portable 2.5" USB drives though, they get a lot of bouncing around and I've seen far too many people have one fail on them.

 

i would say worry about the space later(i.e. until you hit the problem). It really depends on what you want to do with your 'secondary' storage. If it is just being used at home, get a USB enclosure and a big 2.5" HDD.

If it is for on the road use, I would prefer USB flash/SD as HDD(no matter it is in secondary bay or optical drive caddy or enclosure) adds weight/cables etc.

 

Thanks for your input!

I have a desktop, so this is really about portability. The z370 will allow the SD card to install practically flush with the front of the machine, so it makes for an insert and forget solution.

Chimp is right, I am probably getting ahead of myself, but I surely hate it when I buy something then have to re-buy. My understanding is that SSD's loose efficiency quickly once they are loaded past 75% of capacity. thus the 96GB would fit 74GB comfortably. I do believe this gives me ample capacity for anything I can foresee.

The external HD solution is easy, because I'll have the 5400rpm 500GB drive that came in the z370. All I will need is a good eSATA box to put it in.

Thanks again!

 

I agree with the swapping DVD drive for an HDD caddy so you can have best of both worlds. Just get the HDD caddy, put your 500GB in there, slide out the DVD drive, and replace it with the caddy. Then you can get an external enclosure for your DVD drive.

 

Thanks for following up on Madmatt's suggestion! I kinda let that part of his post fall under the radar while contemplating the other comments.
I have a couple of questions:
1) How do I determine if I can remove my DVD and replace with a hard drive?
2) Is there a way to keep the HD from idling (i.e. make it "dead") when I don't need it? Extended battery life and cooler running are as important as performance for me.

Maybe there is a good link and/or video on this?

Thanks!

 

Well the answer to number 1 I can't give you, but there are caddies available for just about any recent laptop that goes in the optical bay, and since just about all optical bays have the same form factor, the difference really boils down to one of matching the trim/contours of the laptop. Maybe someone familiar with your system knows of a proper caddy, but I bet a little googling and ebay searching will get you there.

Typically the drives are only spun up and accessed when they are needed. On an OS drive, this means the drive never really shuts off since there is a lot in the background. For a pure data drive, they usually spin down when not accessed for a while, and this can be customized in Windows as well (although I could be wrong, that option might apply to the whole system).

Really the only downside to a caddy in the optical bay is loss of the bay. But how often are you using the optical drive? Probably only when you are installing programs and/or windows. Windows can be installed onto a 4GB USB key and installed through there (actually faster than through the optical this way too!), and I like to rip ISO images (or some other formats too) of most of my discs, so install something like Daemon Tools or Magic Disc and you can mount these images and use them like an optical drive without actually having an optical drive. Making the drive only needed for that initial rip and for possibly watching movies. An external optical through USB is fine for these cases.

 

Thanks, that sounds like a plan.