Subjective Question: Hybrid Drives

S

Sovereign

2[H]4U
Joined
Mar 21, 2005
Messages
3,098
I know that I am opening myself up to "SSDs are cheap blah blah blah" but I don't want a solid-state drive in my laptop. Why? Because I don't want to spend $300+ to get a 512GB drive.

Unless this is a case where "buy older, cheaper tech works just as well because you don't need bleeding edge."

In that case, feel free to recommend older/less expensive SSDs. My laptop has a 5400RPM 500GB drive in it and day to day it's a bit slow-feeling (subjectivenes alert). I'm sure that's mainly because of access times on hard drives, as even slower SSDs "feel" much quicker than traditional drives.

That said, I absolutely require 500GB of space in my laptop--no downsizing.

Should I nab a Momentous XT 750 (I hear it's a worthy improvement with 8GB cache) or go for an older, large SSD?
 
Older SSDs are not cheap since they were far pricier than newer ones.

Can't your laptop use both the HDD and an SSD, maybe an mSATA one ?
 
What I did in my laptop was use a CD/DVD drive HDD caddy - basicly a gutted dvd drive that a 2.5" HDD can be mounted in, and put a SSD where my HDD was. Worked perfectly for a year+
 
Okay, I didn't know the "older tech is cheaper" rule didn't apply to SSDs (I bought a GTX 470 right after the 5-series arrived, cost $250. Two years in my possession and counting--no problems @ 1920).

I know that there are HDD caddies to replace the optical on my specific laptop model (XPS1640) but that's not an action I want to take. My laptop is my sole readily-optical-equipped computer. I may be a bit crazy-prepared, but I like to have that ability around. Probably because TurboTax tends to come on CDs (parents + discount club warehouse price = buying physical copies).

If there are other ways of shoving mini or micro-SSDs in my computer I would be open to hearing about them.
 
The Hybrid drive at its best is nowhere near an SSD. You can read a review here. If you want an SSD an have the cash, you can get a 512GB model. If not, you can get the momentus and hopefully get some benefit from the flash on the drive. I don't think your E6410 is SATA3 (pretty sure it is not) so you will be topping out at SATA300 (not that it will really be an issue at all).
 
I'm well aware that a hybrid drive is nowhere near an SSD. As I said before, I will not spend the money on a 512 SSD for my laptop, hence my trying to get opinions on hybrid drives vs. traditional ones.

The question then becomes whether the hybrid drive offers a significant enough boost over conventional disks to be worth buying. Reviews suggest it does (even though it gets creamed by SSDs in all sorts of artificial benchmarks I couldn't care less about). But I wanted an [H] opinion--especially since it was very helpful to get one RE: my GPU.
 
The question then becomes whether the hybrid drive offers a significant enough boost over conventional disks to be worth buying.
Click to expand...

If this was the original Momentus XL 500 GB ( I have 4 of them - in 3 different machines) I would say definitely no. It is very rare that the cache makes a noticeable difference. I never ever see fast boots on any of the systems that boot from XLs. Yes even on the $2000 i7 gamer laptop does not boot fast. Although remember that I am a programmer and I have millions of small files on my disks so I may be giving the drive the worst case for caching.
 
Sovereign said:
I'm well aware that a hybrid drive is nowhere near an SSD. As I said before, I will not spend the money on a 512 SSD for my laptop, hence my trying to get opinions on hybrid drives vs. traditional ones.

The question then becomes whether the hybrid drive offers a significant enough boost over conventional disks to be worth buying. Reviews suggest it does (even though it gets creamed by SSDs in all sorts of artificial benchmarks I couldn't care less about). But I wanted an [H] opinion--especially since it was very helpful to get one RE: my GPU.
Click to expand...

IMHO, no it does not offer a significant boost, and you would probably be better off buying a 1TB drive (or a 1.5/2TB if your machine will accept a 12.5-15mm drive) and take the speed boost that the areal density increase will give you over a 750.
 
Sovereign said:
You'd think that would be the BEST case since small random reads are really bad for spinning drives... Weird!
Click to expand...
However some of these change often. I really am not sure why I never notice the performance benefit of the hybrids. If I could figure out that maybe I could optimize my usage.. It would be interesting if there was a good way to tell what files were in the cache. Perhaps a program that reads every file and reports the read latency.
 
Last edited:
The biggest boost is supposed to be startup/shutdown.

My laptop is essentially an internet machine, and I'm under the impression the more "normal" your task load is, the better (fewer programs launched, when you do, similar order).

Keep in mind that yes, I'm referring to my XPS16 as an "internet machine" solely because it's less power-hungry than my big desktop. So when I'm just sitting around I have it on as the daily driver, therefore it gets subjected to things like email.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top