Acer flings forth SSD-booting, HDD-data-storing laptop

Acer has built both an SSD and a hard drive into its latest laptop, the 13in TravelMate 8481. Pick one up and you get 320GB of magnetic storage for data and such, but the 8481 also has a 64GB mSata form-factor SSD to quick-load the OS and your apps. Acer TravelMate 8481 The 8481's battery life runs to nine hours, Acer …

[Anonymous Coward]

SSDs are game-changers - every laptop should have one

I put a SSD into my laptop and OMG boots in 10 seconds! Soooooo good. Would *never* go back to a magentic HDD for the OS ever again in a laptop.

Let's face it, you boot cycle laptops a lot more often than desktops. And the HDDs for laptops tend to be slower so the god-awful swap thrashing Microsoft like to do (for no valid reason) tends to f@#$ up your day, too, if you're using a laptop HDD.

So praise to any manufacturer pushing SSDs for the OS. Thank you! Long live SSDs!

[Lee Dowling]

Eh?

Boot-cycle laptops? The only times I ever reboot mine fully is when something crashes really hard (and is usually followed by days of diagnosis to stop it happening again). Laptops brought this amazing thing called "suspend" and "hibernate" to the user's attention, and it's now an option on every shutdown dialog on every operating system in common use.

My laptop is XP too, so the "uptime" of the single session that's been running on it for months a time is huge and quite impressive by now - XP isn't the most stable of OS but it obviously still pretty damn good, without ever seeing a BIOS screen in the meantime (I much prefer suspend because it can last being "off" all day and it's rare that the laptop is off for more than an entire day, and it resumes instantly).

More importantly - why not just have the SSD-caching HDD's that are coming out now and fit in a single 2.5" drive and would presumably take a lot less power? Or just two HDD's in a RAID setup? Dual drives in a laptop just sounds like the perfect way to increase power, costs and component count, i.e. things to potentially break, without getting much benefit for it. Gimme a laptop with two drives and I'll stick two SSD-caching HDD's in there, mirroring each other - and get better power consumption, better data security and probably cheaper too.

[JC_]

Looks Good to Me

mSATA is used because it's smaller - clearly there isn't room for two 2.5" drive. The SSD caching HDDs (i.e. Momentus XT) are nowhere near as fast as a proper SSD. 2 HDDs in RAID sounds like a recipe for unreliability (if using RAID 0), noise and high power use.

[David Simpson 1]

Dual drives ?

It doesn't use dual drives, the SSD is a mini PCI express card that is about the size of a WIFI card.

SSD's use very little power so no advantage to a flash enabled HDD.

[frank ly]

re.Boot Cycling

I always Hibernate my laptop to give me a faster startup time, but an SSD would improve this of course. (I do a full re-boot every now and then to clear out any crud that may have built up, or after those updates that demand a Restart).

[David Simpson 1]

S not H

Sleep not Hibernate is the answer.

[a_mu]

hybrid drive

would this not be the same as a hybrid drive

like the segate baby, that can already be fitted to laptops and net books ?

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=momentus-xt-seagate-delivers-fastest-pr&vgnextoid=afb2308aaecb8210VgnVCM1000001a48090aRCRD

[Zahid Hanif]

re.S not H

I agree with David Simpson 1. Also, every hibernate performed will wear down the SSD.

As for the laptop, this is better (faster) option than the hybrid drives.

[A J Stiles]

Now that's not a bad idea

Using SSD (which is fast but only allows limited overwrites) for / (which doesn't change much) and HDD for /home, /var, /tmp and swap (which does) really does look like the best of both worlds, and I'm going to have to try it myself.

Boffin-level question: Does writing to a subfolder also necessarily write to the directory of the containing folder? If the directory of / gets updated everytime something gets changed in /home or /tmp, then there is no wear-reduction benefit.

[Anonymous Coward]

toy screen

That be the sort of 'road warrior' who likes to think of himself as a something special and indispensible yet watching DVDs is the primary factor considered in choosing a laptop. How can they call it a laptop for professionals when it has a screen aspect ration that's designed for watching movies and an utterly naff vertical resolution? Give us this with 4:3 aspect and >1000 vertical pleeeease.