SSD vs Hybrid drives

[homer98]

Hey all, just curious as to what the benefits of a hybrid drive are? is the speed comparable to SSD's?

also, is there much of an offering for hybrid drives? how available are they? any comments/opinions would be greatly appreciated, Cheers

[Shadowmeph]

I never heard of a Hybrid drive what is it exactly?

[Synth]

Originally Posted by homer98

Hey all, just curious as to what the benefits of a hybrid drive are? is the speed comparable to SSD's?

also, is there much of an offering for hybrid drives? how available are they? any comments/opinions would be greatly appreciated, Cheers

They are marginally faster than conventional (platter) drives, and offer more capacity than SSDs.

In my opinion, they might only be worth it in single-drive laptops where you need speed and storage.

In a desktop, I would choose a combination of SSD and conventional drives instead of hybrids.

[ADay2Long]

Hey I have a a Seagate Momentus XT drive in my laptop and a X-25M in my desktop.

The XT is nowhere near as sharp as the SSD, that's the simple answer.

Now for a laptop. The XT is a 7200 rpm drive which is an improvement compared to the 5400 drive that came with the laptop. It has a 4 GB SSD cache, and the drive learns as you go. The programs you use often (OS, Firefox, iTunes and what not) load faster and faster as the drive knows you tend to use those programs often.

So the drive is a must for any laptop that only has room for one drive. Great price, great speed, great capacity. But right now no it doesn't beat an SSD in speed.

[homer98]

Ok, thanks for the clarification. Laptops would benefit from hybrid drive, but its more worthwhile to get SSD and HDD for desktop. Good to know.

[_dangtx_]

tell you the truth, if i were to build and was undecided between getting a 1-2tb for storage and a 40 giger ssd for the os? that seagate hybrid starts looking interesting :)

[frontier204]

To my knowledge, the only hybrid HDD in production for consumer is the Seagate Momentus XT.
I've actually tried the Seagate Momentus XT 320GB vs a Kingston SSDNow (not plus) Gen 2 128GB in both my laptop (as the only drive) and my desktop (as an OS drive).
When the Momentus XT's flash was boosting the performance (generally at boot and some program startups), I did not notice much difference from the SSD. Note that my SSD is a relatively low-end drive that I can actually cause stutter on if I try hard enough. When the Momentus XT flash is not helping (e.g. trying to run something you just installed) however, it is as slow as any other laptop hard drive.

The benefits for me for the hybrid HDD versus a regular HDD is the boost provided on frequently-used applications (it works better than SuperFetch because it has less activity during boot). As previous posters said, it cannot compare to an SSD (even a low-end one).
Note that the Momentus XT generally has higher power consumption than a lone SSD or HDD so you may want to watch out if you have an undercooled laptop.

If you're not storing a ton of stuff on a desktop, RAID 0 for Seagate Momentus XT looks rather promising: Seagate Momentus XT 500GB ST95005620AS Review - Overclockers Club

[Varroa]

I have a compact size PC That I just built with one of these Hybrid drives (socket 775, quad core, 4GB ram, etc..). I have only just finished installing Vista and all the SPs but so far I have to say I am very impressed with the speed. Compared to my gaming rig which uses a 120GB OCZ agilily SSD for the boot drive, the speeds are pretty comparable during boot up. The real test will be with the randoms. I have a feeling the hybrid drive will feel just like any other HDD when it comes to random reads/writes since the cache doesn't come into play while a SSD will shine. I have 3 PCs with SSDs now so I am have good idea of how fast then can be.