Even Apple's next operating system, Lion, will be available only as a download from the App store that will install without the need for optical media. Being an unconventional approach this may seem a bit odd at first, but there are three reasons why someone would want to do this:Įven though optical media is still widely used, most content is available via download and can be placed on flash drives as disk images if you need to install it. This will allow you to take advantage of a small and cheaper SSD drive, while maintaining a second larger mechanical drive in the system.

The second option is a more practical one, which is to replace the optical drive in the system with a bracket that can hold a second hard drive in its place. The first is to use a larger external drive along with a smaller internal SSD, but this may not be the best option (especially for laptops) because external drives are slower, more prone to breaking, and will require you to lug them around to keep attached to your system. To overcome this limitation for the MacBook Pro, beside dishing out the money for a large SSD you can take two routes. SSD drives such as OWC's Mercury Extreme line (shown here) can be exceptionally expensive, especially for larger capacity ones.

Apple offers this as a configuration option for new iMac and Mac Pro systems, but so far Apple's laptops have not had the capability of holding more than one hard drive, at least with the default configuration. For example, the average price of a 500GB mechanical drive is currently around $40 whereas a 500GB SSD is over 20x more expensive at around $850.īecause price may be a limiting factor for upgrading, one option is to create a hybrid SSD environment to give yourself the best of both worlds: a small and fast SSD drive to hold your system and applications, and a larger mechanical drive to hold your larger personal data. This is especially true if you need to maintain large storage capacity on your system. Unfortunately along with its benefits, SSD technology is currently very pricy, to the point where it may not be feasible to upgrade a system with a comparably sized drive. Beyond speed, the drives also have a number of additional perks, including cooler operation than most mechanical drives, power efficiency resulting in longer battery life for laptops, silent operation, and higher tolerance for abuse since there is no need to protect moving mechanical components.

Data access and throughput can be well above 4x faster than a contemporary mechanical drive, and using it as your main boot drive widens a major bottleneck, resulting in exceptionally quick boot-ups, application launches, sleep and wake events, and shutdowns. There is no doubt that when compared to a mechanical hard drive, the new solid state drive (SSD) technology is by far superior in terms of speed.

Macbook internal drive