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What am I?

I'm a technology consultant, focused on enterprise collaborative applications. I'm based in North-east Scotland but work all over Europe, and sometimes I present at technology conferences using a mixture of deep-technology and humour to keep the audience awake.

I'm married with one grown-up daughter of whom I'm immensely proud, and have family members covering most significant time-zones. We took 'hide and seek' seriously.

Other interests include making excuses not to go to the gym, testing the tolerance of my peers with humour, and sometimes bringing my 20-year old ZZR 600 out of the garage to terrify myself with.

I've been blogging since it was called 'Talking cr@p on the internet' and at one stage hand-rolled my own blog. Fame and fortune for this minor technological greatness is still 'in the post'.

Enjoy my little outpost on the web and take cheer that it could be worse - I could be a Silverlight consultant...

How to get in touch?

I have a mobile phone number which has been unchanged in 15 years. Most folks have that. Or you can try eMailing me - look at the domain name and take a good guess which will work. Most things will. I'm on Linked-In for the business stuff, Facebook for the personal stuff, and Skype for the face to face stuff. 

I'm a freelance consultant, and I'm engaged by enterprise or government customers. Most of the work I do I cannot speak about, so excuse my somewhat clumsy evasions. 

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Friday
Jul232010

Hybrid Laptop Drives

DateFriday, July 23, 2010 at 10:56AM

A long long time ago - I tried out Vista. Piece of godawful crap that it was, it forced me to confront my natural MS bias and choose to start owning Macs. And I've never regretted this.

Around this time, in order to make Vista more responsive, hard drive manufacturers started talking about Hybrid drives - drives with normal hard drives, and SSD caches. 

And now - Years after this - we finally get the first example of one. Darren Duke reviewed and benchmarked a Seagate Momentus XT drive back in June - and I immediately placed an order. 

So. Does a hybrid drive really deliver near SSD speeds ? Last night, I thought I'd give it a whirl in a one-year old Macbook Pro 13" unibody machine. My main travelling laptop. Its been bounced around, abused and is as reliable a laptop as I've ever owned. However, I do development on this machine, and the wee hard drive - a seagate 7200rpm 500gb one - has trouble keeping up. (Normal users - or 'Muggles' - shouldnt have this issue).

So - I backed up the machine using Super Duper (Highly recommended. I use this alongside Time Machine to ensure that I always have a bootable external-USB drive with me at all times), and swapped it over.

Has it helped? Yes. Boot time for the machine went down from 1 minute 10 seconds to 44 seconds (after four restarts), and the post-login load time went from 5:30 to 1:22. I load a *lot* of stuff on startup, including Notes.

I also tested the Notes load time - and it went from 41 seconds to 11. 

And - a huge bonus - I no longer see the beachball mouse icon! (The one that indicates the O/S is waiting on hard drive). 

So. Around £100. 5 hours to back up, 15 minutes to swap. Worth it ? 

Ohhh yeah. 

AuthorBill Buchan | Comment4 Comments |

Reader Comments (4)

You might want to turn off pagefile too, so that it doesn't swap - assuming you have 3GB RAm installed. Well worth it

July 23, 2010 | Unregistered CommenterJack

Hi Bill, interested in this, because I'd also heard good things about the hybrid drives and, much as I'd love an SSD for both MBP and Thinkpad, I'm quite attached to my kidneys. I might give the hybrid a whirl .....

July 23, 2010 | Unregistered CommenterDave Hay

I just recently logged on this as well - let's all thank Darren for finding it originally. I am VERY happy, my Linux PC is so much faster and Notes is really coming up fast. The one thing it does not help with as much is VMWare, as the files for that are cut up into 2 GB slices, the extra cache does not help as much. But WELL WORTH IT, I agree

July 24, 2010 | Unregistered CommenterVictor "NASA Hair" Toal

Thanks Bill, got 2 of the last 6 in stock.
Sean

July 24, 2010 | Unregistered CommenterSean Cull

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