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

Two-drive TravelMate inbound

By Hard Reg, 15th July 2011

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.

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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COMMENTS

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Highly Rated

Posted Friday 15th July 2011 12:17 GMT

David Simpson 1

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.

Posted Sunday 24th July 2011 08:57 GMT

Anonymous Coward

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.

Posted Friday 22nd July 2011 14:58 GMT

A J Stiles

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.