I just purchased and installed in my old macbook a new 500gb Seagate Solid State Hybrid Drive. It’s mostly a standard HDD but it also contains 4gb of solid state flash storage, which if I understand it correctly kind of acts like additional RAM. In addition to that it’s a 72000 RPM drive with 32mb of cache.

This drive has made a big improvement in my computers performance. Start-up is faster, and everything seems snappier. Most importantly though is that Spotlight search is lightning fast now. I rely on Spotlight to find files because I’m a bit of a hoarder and don’t use folders all that well for projects. Mostly because many of the projects I do bleed into one another, so that .pdf of a study of what makes a neighborhood walkable doesn’t belong in just one folder.

Anyway, if you’re in the market for a new hard drive, I highly recommend the Seagate Momentus® XT Solid State Hybrid Drive. It’s made a huge difference in my computer performance.