You know... Some people still use spinning metal. Also, my notebook is also my main work machine and it only fits one 2.5" device inside it (albeit I'm tempted to experiment with running the OS off an SD card, if not for speed (which is unlikely) for battery life. I don't care if Emacs comes up in 2 seconds instead of four.
Even with SSDs, by keeping the files in contiguous blocks (I would assume this program may even purposely not do it - as it would make sense to interleave blocks of files that are opened simultaneously during the boot process in the order the blocks - not the files - are called in) you may get some extra mileage out of your storage - you'd have a simpler structure for each file - instead of a list of blocks (or extents) you'd have the whole thing in a single extent.
Switching my laptop disk to SSD was probably the best investment I made (laptop related anyways). 64GB or even 96GB SSDs are quite cheap . You can buy an external, USB powered casing for the (presumably) big platter disk and use it like that.
Many recent laptops have mini-PCIe slots. You can put a credit card sized SSD in that slot as your boot disk, and then use the 2.5" drive bay for spinning media with lots of space. Here is an example one from Intel with pictures: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167...
You cannot put an msata drive in a pcie slot without a pcie to sata controller. You can get these eg http://www.sunmantechnology.com/system-ip/usb-i2c-fml.html but the fact that they are the same slot does not mean they are compatible.
Good idea, though general consensus seems to be to put the SSD in the optical bay, and keep the HDD in the main bay, which (at least in Apple laptops) is the only one that supports the sudden-acceleration drop sensor.
You know... Some people still use spinning metal. Also, my notebook is also my main work machine and it only fits one 2.5" device inside it (albeit I'm tempted to experiment with running the OS off an SD card, if not for speed (which is unlikely) for battery life. I don't care if Emacs comes up in 2 seconds instead of four.
Even with SSDs, by keeping the files in contiguous blocks (I would assume this program may even purposely not do it - as it would make sense to interleave blocks of files that are opened simultaneously during the boot process in the order the blocks - not the files - are called in) you may get some extra mileage out of your storage - you'd have a simpler structure for each file - instead of a list of blocks (or extents) you'd have the whole thing in a single extent.