Hybrid drive SSHD

[EggsBenedict]

Anyone got experience with these? Reading up here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_drive, and on Seagate's site, it sounds like you get high boot speeds and good capacity.

If your requirement is a fast startup time, but you're OK with the time taken to retreive photos etc. it sounds ideal?

Anyone got one of these - seems like 1TB can be had for about 65 quid.

[Bikerjon]

I use them all the time, both 3.5 and 2.5's. Hardly ever fit conventional hard drives any more - mostly use SSD's but hybrids are useful where more storage is required at a lower cost. There's definitely a performance boost but not as noticeable as an SSD.

[EggsBenedict]

I recently put an SSD in a laptop that I used to run Ubuntu. As I don't ever store anything on it (we only use it for net surfing really), I just chose a reasonably small SSD and then did a fresh install of Lubuntu on it. It's pretty ancient, but it boots really fast now.

I wanted to do the same with my Windows desktop. However, the HDD is 320Gb, and it's pretty well maxed with windows 7 pro plus other crap. I could rationalise a bit, but I still did want to do the transfer to the new storage as simply as possible. If I get a smaller than 320Gb SSD (cheaper) then it makes me have to do more work to rationalise down. Buying bigger, it gets disproportionately more expensive.

So I guess if the OS boot sits in the 'fast' part of the disk, I should get good boot speeds, but the other data access will be as I get now.

[mojitomax]

I just put a 500gb ssd into a 7 year old white Intel macbook. It's quicker but I think the ancient motherboard etc is holding it back. Hopefully it should be good enough for the next 7 years as a rexipent for photos from and eyefi setup and playing music from iTunes for 8 hours a day at work