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

Two-drive TravelMate inbound

Cloud based data management

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 claimed, and it said that said power pack has a greater longevity than most, not losing 20 per cent of its capacity after the usual 300 recharge cycles but after 1000.

Other specs include Sandy Bridge Core i processors, a choice of integrated-only and dual-GPU graphics - integrated plus Nvida, with the latter's Optimus tech handling the switch over.

The Acer TravelMate 8481 will be available the end of August for around £840. ®

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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.

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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.

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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.

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