Here’s an interesting little drive, a standard 500gb laptop hard disk with a 4gb SSD for cacheing the most often used elements on the disk…
Upon boot, we noticed a 1 – 2 second improvement in how long it took to show us a useable desktop; hardly Earth-shattering, but a decent start. From there, we fired up Firefox, Photoshop CS5, Skitch, TweetDeck and iTunes in succession. Again, a 1 – 2 second improvement in total load time. But after using the apps for a bit, we shut our machine down and rebooted, doing the same song and dance all over again. And again. And again.
We went through this process four total times, with each one getting a bit quicker when it came to load time. After we’d given it ample opportunity to grasp our preferred flow, we noticed a 6 – 8 second improvement in total load time. That may not sound like a lot, but percentage wise it’s hardly worth sneezing at.
Still it might be a struggle to justify the cost, as the Momentus XT costs about £75 currently, compared to £35 for the same capacity. Cheaper than an SSD, might be worth it if you need to space on the move.
via Engadget.