Well, my 60 GB Windows 7 partition is not enough for what I’m doing. It should be fine for “light use”, but after installing the full Office 2010, Visual Studio 2010 Pro and countless other SDKs, it isn’t anymore. I’ve spent way too much time trying to clean up temporary files, removing the “hibernation” file and so on, and it’s just cutting too much on my productivity.
On desktops it is usual to combine a SSD boot drive and a big HDD for the rest, but on a small laptop you’re usually stuck choosing one or the other. True, some people mod their MacBook Pros to replace the optical drive with a HDD (or SSD), but I don’t want to do something as drastic (and void my warranty in the process).
Thankfully, there are self-powered external USB HDD, now at reasonable prices for 1 TB and higher. For example, the latest My Passport by Western Digital are now available up to 2 TB and support USB 3. They make your laptop less portable, but they’re still very convenient, not too expensive, and give a huge boost in storage space. They’re not new: The first iPods were based on portable HDDs in the first place before switching to smaller capacity solid-state memory. Still, SSDs haven’t increased enough in capacity to warrant a full replacement for many users, myself included.
Published on October 8, 2012 at 22:00 EDT
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