I read an article about this in Engadget a few weeks back but forget the brand/model. The drive has some software which sees which programs you use the most and then installs them to the SSD for faster loading. Does this sound familiar?

I think you're talking about hybrid drives like this one with a 32 Mb cache

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Seagate/ST750LX003/

Quite a bit cheaper than a full bore SSD of comparable size

Be interesting to hear a real world comparison to a 256 GB SSD

Similar idea but instead of being part of the drive itself this one plugged into another SATA socket to augment the current primary drive.

My 15 year old son just built himself a computer with a 120g ssd to run his OS and most used software. He's got much larger drives for storage, etc... That machine is blazing fast. It boots windows 7 in just a few seconds. Complex 3D rendering software seems to open in a heartbeat.
Impressive.

I want to learn how to do this..
My desktop is painstakingly slow at loading up just the OS!

All of my Macs ( 10.7.4 ) boot up in under 30-45 seconds these days, since I equipped them all with 256 Gb SSDs, from www.macsales.com

All I have on the boot drive are my OS and my applications. My iTunes Library and all data are on other internal hard drives, or external drives for laptops.

Originally Posted by NikonsandVstroms I read an article about this in Engadget a few weeks back but forget the brand/model. The drive has some software which sees which programs you use the most and then installs them to the SSD for faster loading. Does this sound familiar?

Most likely this is the article (from Sep. 5, 2012):

http://www.engadget.com/2012/09/05/sandisk-readycache/

Note that this is a "Windows 7 only" solution to system speedup, and involves installing both the mini-SSD and some software to manage the cache.

For Windows 7 users with limited and little software, this could be a viable boost in system speed. For users with a lot of software, not so much. (It's only 32 GB in size.)

Originally Posted by ziggy53 Most likely this is the article (from Sep. 5, 2012): http://www.engadget.com/2012/09/05/sandisk-readycache/ Note that this is a "Windows 7 only" solution to system speedup, and involves installing both the mini-SSD and some software to manage the cache. For Windows 7 users with limited and little software, this could be a viable boost in system speed. For users with a lot of software, not so much. (It's only 32 GB in size.)

Thanks for the link, 32 GB actually seems to be more than enough. I just looked and my whole Adobe suite which is the design version and it only takes up about 5, say the OS is another 10 and that still leaves ~15 GB. Plus this thing is only 50 bucks! Time to read some reviews.

i actually just installed one of the hybrid drives in my mid 2010 mac book pro a month ago
i couldn't afford (didn't want to afford) a 256GB SSD as still too expensive here in Switzerland

it's a definite improvement over a regular hard drive although obviously nothing on a full SSD drive.

Best idea I've ever seen for a macbook pro is to remove the CD drive and put in a caddy and put a big normal laptop drive (750GB+) for data and then replace the boot drive with a small SSD - e.g. 128GB

for the amount of times i use a CD/DVD I can just plug in an external USB drive

again - was too expensive (and not available) here in Switzerland but seems dead easy to buy in the US