Hybrid Drives

[cbennett926]

Can I get a 500 gig sata hybrid drive with 4 gig SSD and put the boot files and necesseties on the SSD portion to get the speed boost? I.E. Fast boot/shutdown, fast wake up from sleep, fast program opening etc.

[LowSky]

Hybrid drives don't work that way. All data gets stored onto the normal Hard disk. The SSD portion is used like long term cache. Basically by the time the PC boots for the 5th time it will know your habits and keep the more important files on the SSD,

[mips]

Hybrid drives don't work that way. All data gets stored onto the normal Hard disk. The SSD portion is used like long term cache. Basically by the time the PC boots for the 5th time it will know your habits and keep the more important files on the SSD,

This ^^

There is also a 750GB unit with 8GB cache available.

[CharlesA]

Hybrid drives don't work that way. All data gets stored onto the normal Hard disk. The SSD portion is used like long term cache. Basically by the time the PC boots for the 5th time it will know your habits and keep the more important files on the SSD,
That makes it sound like it's totally not worth it.

Might as well just get an SSD and a regular hard drive, and do it manually.

[3Miro]

That makes it sound like it's totally not worth it.

You can fit lots of stuff on 4GB, but I don't think it is enough. Intel Z68 chipsets can connect a stand-alone SSD and a stand-alone HDD into a hybrid mode and thus get 20 - 40GB of SSD cache, but then you might as well do it manually.



Might as well just get an SSD and a regular hard drive, and do it manually.
That's what I do.

[CharlesA]

You can fit lots of stuff on 4GB, but I don't think it is enough.

Aye. 4GB doesn't really go a long way unless you only put the OS on that area. I'll just stick to my 500GB hard drive. ;)

[madjr]

That makes it sound like it's totally not worth it.

Might as well just get an SSD and a regular hard drive, and do it manually.

yea, is probably marketing to wow some consumers.

[mips]

Aye. 4GB doesn't really go a long way unless you only put the OS on that area. I'll just stick to my 500GB hard drive. ;)

All your OS files and regularly used apps like browser, file manager would fit into that 4GB. It does profiling to see what the most frequently used files are and moves them to the SSD portion. If you still think 4GB is to little then get the 750GB drive which has a 8GB SSD portion.

Everyone I know that owns one of these drives is very happy with the performance boost they are getting out of it.

[LowSky]

This is more of a Laptop solution than for desktops. How many laptops can even use two drives at once to begin with. Certainly netbooks and ultrabooks benefit from a drive like this best. I already have an SSD in my desktop and its amazing, but for my laptop which is used more for day to day (while my desktop is my workhorse and media center) so I need a drive with plenty of room and being fast as possible is a plus. SSDs are not cheap enough for the room I am accustomed to and I haven't played the will it fit game since Windows 98SE. My laptop runs Windows 7 and I kinda need it to do that. If I didn't I would used by a small 64GB SSD and just enjoy it. Alas I cannot. I like to play games and store way to much media on it that 64GB probably doesn't cover Windows let alone 20-40 applications. So an Hybrid is a great alternative to getting the amount of space I need for a lot cheaper than a SSD with the same amount of space.