Experience With Hybrid Drives?

[comp142]

Can anyone give me their thoughts after using the Seagate Momentus XT drives in a real world, daily usage situation?

I have my operating system on an SSD and my games and files on a HDD. I love the speed solid operation my Samsung 830 is giving me, but just can't bring myself to drop the kind of money it would take for a large SSD for the rest.

Is the difference noticeable enough to use one of these until SSD prices drop?

 

[drescherjm]

Can anyone give me their thoughts after using the Seagate Momentus XT drives in a real world, daily usage situation?

I have 4 of these at work. Just think of this as a hardware ready boost feature that combines a 4 or 8 GB USB flash drive to a laptop hard drive for caching reads in the case of the 500GB model or some writes in the case of the new 750GB model. Do not get tricked into thinking you will get SSD like performance at all. I do not see that and I use these machines daily for more than a year now.

 

[comp142]

No. I have no illusions of this matching SSD speeds.

Just want to know, as an example, would load times for say game levels etc. show a noticeable reduction in time.

 

[drescherjm]

I can't comment on any load times for game levels since these are on work machines.

 

[Trepidati0n]

No. I have no illusions of this matching SSD speeds.

Just want to know, as an example, would load times for say game levels etc. show a noticeable reduction in time.

Only if they land up in the "SSD" part of the drive. Since you hvae no control of that...it may make it go faster...it may not.

 

[ob1]

We put the 500 GB in my wife's desktop system and it works great. It speeds up most of her applications, although she isn't a big gamer. She mostly surfs, facebooks, farmville, zooville and stuff like that, so its not stressful. although everything she does is really sped up quite nicely, and she thinks her hand me down computer is state of the art due to its speed, specifically on boot times and waking up from sleep.

Now on my son's laptop, (he has a laptop and desktop), we put in the new 750 seagate hybrid and its amazing for that laptop. Its a whole new machine and everything seems to benefit, even games. I'm not sure how it caches all of that stuff in the 16 GB of SSD on the drive, but it does and it works wonders for that machine. Although its not as fast as his Z68 cached tower system, but for a lappy, its pretty smooth...

 

[drescherjm]

Only if they land up in the "SSD" part of the drive. Since you hvae no control of that...it may make it go faster...it may not.

That is what I have experienced. However as a programmer I have a hundreds of thousands to millions of small files that change a lot so I am probably the worst case scenario.

Although I do have a 5 year old dual core core2 laptop dell D610 that I have a Momentus XT 500 GB on it and I do not program on it (too slow to get work done) and it still does not boot fast with the hybrid.

 

[comp142]

Only if they land up in the "SSD" part of the drive. Since you hvae no control of that...it may make it go faster...it may not.

As I understand it, if a program is frequently used those parts of it accessed would be what ends up in the NAND.
I have only a few regularly used programs and I tend to play one game at any given stretch of time thus my interest that this may be a good solution for me.

 

[comp142]

Thanks for the feedback ob1.

I considered one of these for my laptop too, but I'm obsessive about the amount of data I keep on it and for the price of one of these drives I can get a 128GB SSD as I don't need the large capacity.