Hybrid SSD drives ?
 

I just ordered the "Seagate Momentus XT 750 GB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 32 MB Cache 2.5 Inch Solid State Hybrid Drive ST750LX003", not sure what to expect from it, it comes with 8 GB SLC NAND and some kind of smart caching technology to speed up commonly used applications.

Anyone using any ? Did it make a big difference for your computer ?

It'll make booting significantly faster. In a year or so the technology should improve so it makes more difference while the system is running.

SSDs are already pretty cheap.

Get one to setup the system on and a regular IDE as a storage to keep content (or whatever) on.

:2 cents::2 cents::thumbsup

I looked at soke benchmarks that showed some great improvements when starting the same apps repeatedly, obviously in the real world the disk is used for a lot more than timing those apps so I'm wondering how well it works. 8 gb ssd storage seems a little low but can probably help with the most comon apps... 16 or 32 would probably have been the perfect size

I think I can fit just 1, I use a macbook pro... 800+ seems really high for a 512 gb drive

you dont need 500gb for a notebook

I been eye these drives up myself especially since they 2.5 Inch

Huh? How would you know? I don't have a stationary computer, I dock my laptop at home and at the office, I really only need a laptop... I don't have any content to worry about and laptops are just as fast for genral purposes as desktops

How can a SSD have 7200RPM .. I thought it was just all RAM with no moving parts?

Oh, just read about it, it's not a SSD you bought..

There's probably a slightly higher chance of the drive failing because it uses both SSD and mechanical storage.

But failure can happen with any drive anyway, without warning...

Don't forget to back up your data.

I said that if you work from a notebook, you dont need 500gb of space.

Get an 120Gb SSD for $150

are ssd better than normal ?

is water wet?

i have been looking for a replacement for my main for ages now ive seen the ssd but nothing has convinced me to buy one yet

And would it be different if I worked from a stationary computer ?

You really don't get far with 120GB these days.

When I hooked up my new mac yesterday it downloaded 1.5 GB of updates, it was shipped with Lion already installed.

Not sure what you do but with only 120GB I'd have to constantly delete files etc which is really not something I want to spend so much time on. My mails alone would take more than 5% of the total disk space I'd have available. :(

Dude you use it to run your system. Not to store your files.

I can fit only 1 hard drive in the system which is why I'm looking at Hybrid disks

You could always use an external drive for file storage.

That said, I don't know enough about hybrids to know whether they're a good enough choice vs. that option.

Just bought a USB powered 1 TB WD for $150 at bestbuy, I use it to store all my workfiles, including video updates. I always keep at least 25% free on my laptop, I travel a lot so this works perfect for me..

I forget my mouse all the time and forgot the charger a couple of times as well, can't see how I would ever remember to bring around an external hard drive :helpme

It's a lot faster for many small files, what geeks call random IO. Booting the OS uses a lot of small files, for example, so an SSD will boot a lot faster. It's not better for big sequential files, like video.

The difference is, with a spinning drive, the system has to read one file, then wait for the drive spin around to where the next file is. It also has to move the mechanical read/write head to the right track. With flash, both thumb drives and USB, there are no moving parts, so no waiting to get to the next file.

Big files like videos are stored sequentially, so there's no jumping around and therefore no advantage for flash (SSD).

How much of an improvement depends also on how much RAM you have. It's small files that SSDs do faster, but it's also small files that get cached in RAM anyway and reordered for writing, so with gobs of RAM the disk doesn't get as much random IO. An example is one of our Clonebox servers, which has 32 GB of system RAM. The RAID cards have another 1 GB of cache, and there's 512 MB of cache on the drives themselves. That means there is plenty of RAM to save up those small writes and write them out in sequential order, so SSDs wouldn't help us much.

thank you for that :thumbsup

i have my os running from a SSD for 2 or 3 years already and can't look back... I'm considering getting those hybrid to replace my storage drives....

The rumor is they are not very reliable but the idea and performance will be better.

invest in regular ssd..