I need to kit out a dev-review notebook with a few VM's on it. I'll need about 600Gb min. I don't usually expect more than a VM to be in use at any one time. I'm not really into spending a lot for this (e.g. I'm getting a bottom-feeder £700 notebook for starters), but at the same time pretty everything else I have is SSD and when I pick up other people's hybrid or HDD machines I just feel like I've gone back a decade, so I'm looking for SSD response in general. How does the Black2 do in a VM-heavy situation? Am I better off in terms of frustration avoidance with an M500 / 840 Basic, or is the Black2 sufficiently plausible?
You do know that the Black2 doesn't use the nand for caching the HDD data, yes? Yeah, simply put you'd be buying a *very* average 120GB SSD & a 1TB 5400rpm HDD in one... ...so, whilst it might be a reasonable option for some other usage at ~£161 - maybe storing bunches of media whilst having the OS & a few programs on the SSD - it's really not a great option for what you're planning; esp as you've said that using other people's machines with HDDs bugs you, & you'd be sticking the VMs onto an even slower drive than a typical 7200rpm desktop boot HDD. You're also looking at a noticeably higher power usage using a HDD, so it depends how portable you want the notebook to be for any length of time. Otherwise, i assume you're thinking of the Evo (as the basic only goes up to 500GB) & the M550 (as it's the nearest Crucial drive, both price & speed wise)? Of the two, the Evo should be a little bit quicker for what you're doing & provisionally appears to be £20 cheaper atm @ ~£310 vs ~£330.
Ah... I didn't realise, I thought it was some kind of tiering drive. I can't even use it in IRST? Samsung - yeah, lost track of their names, I mean the Basic EVO, EVO Basic, or EVO Basic Turbo Edition or whatever it is - something with EVO and Basic in it.
With isrt (intel smart response technology) then you either have to set the HDD & SSD up in raid mode in the bios or be using a SSHD with >=8GB of nand... ...however i would assume that the former is impossible as there's only one sata connection on the Black2 - so logically they can't be set up in raid (even assuming that the notebook has the option)... ...& it's not a SSHD as the nand is a separate device from the HDD, not caching in any way. Separately, i can find nothing to suggest either way that isrt has any VMWare guest OS awareness - so it's not even clear if it would speed up any of your virtual machines... if it could though, i'd then still question the 120GB size as being far too small for your purposes (& the annoyance with using HDDs) - as i'm assuming that, to get to >600MB, you're looking at anything between 10 & 20 different VMs where, after a point, you'd have to be repeatedly load a new one up to kick previous ones out of the cache when you wanted to use an alt one.
