Hi all.
I am thinking about putting a fast hard drive in my laptop. I only have one drive bay so it’s looking like either a hybrid SSD drive or 10k spindle speed.
Looking at…
Seagate ST1000LM014 1TB Solid State Hybrid Drive - £89.39
Pros : Cheaper, More capacity, Faster (if the data is on the SSD)
Cons : Slower (if the data is on the platters), SSD has limited write cycles
Western Digital WD5000BHTZ 500GB Velociraptor - £109.98
Pros : Faster random access, has cool name
Cons : Power hungry
Has anyone had any experience with drives like these? Any opinions welcome.
BS
I only just got a hybrid myself, but it’s too early to tell if there’s much of a difference between it and the regular HD it replaced. I went for the slightly older Seagate 750GB Momentus XT model, as that has 7200rpm as opposed to 5400 of the newer 1TB model so there is a fractional seek time advantage. Average sustained transfers should be about the same trading off the rotational speed vs. density. Oh, the older model uses SLC flash whereas the newer model uses MLC. Believe it gives priority to boot files, and otherwise learns which files you access the most to cache those. It wont cache everything, but should do well on the common stuff. Because it keeps frequently accessed stuff, I guess it wont try to cache all reads thus wear and tear will not be as fast as for a conventional SSD.
Chances are the differences are mostly theoretical and only detectable in a benchmark.