hybrid hard drives
 

Looking at getting a 2tb hard drive, was just gonna get barracuda but then spotted hybrid arn't that much more.

anyone ried them, are they worth bothering with?

gonna be mainly used as a game storgae drive so the extra sped would be usefull

They can be a lot faster than a normal drive under some situations as they have a good size disk cache to call upon but they are a compromise compared with an SSD. SSD's are dropping in price and gaining in size very rapidly.

Given the price of mechanical drives now I would pay the extra for the Hybrid as loading screens bug me. I usually play my main game of the moment off my C: SSD.

my c drive is 120gb ssd (vertex 4 which you cant buy bigger), and then a 1tb spinny, spinny is full, basicly will just be an add on hd to put more games on that will benefit from the ssd side of it. will prob keep the othe drive for movies etc

sounds like a plan :)

My personal Laptop has an SSD, my Personal Desktop has an SSD and some HDDs, and my works Laptop has a SSD/HDD Hybrid.
SSD is certainly the way to go, noticable improvemtns over HDD.
I notice hardly any improvements on the Hybrid over the HDD, the only things that speed up are commonly used programs, boot times don't seem any faster at all.

I originally used hybrid drives on my laptop and was so impressed by the speed increase that I got a 2.5" 750GB drive as a boot drive for my 8 HDD home machine!

Since then, they have brought out a 3.5" hybrid and I'm running a 2TB as my boot drive now.

Couple of things to consider:

The drives I've used (Seagate) intelligently place frequently used files into the SSD portion. Consequently, they are good for faster booting but no good for general faster access - films for example - unless you continuously watch the same film. I would add that when I tested my machines on first installing the drives it took about 5 - 6 reboots for the speed increase to settle down. IIRC, I think I went from a 2:30 start up to around 1 minute on a new Windows install.

Second thing to consider, I couldn't get the drives to be recognised using an external caddy to copy partitions over from my original drives. I had to install the new and old drive into my desktop and copy internally. I think it has something to do with sector size not being compatible through a USB connection.

Hi there

I personally using Toshiba DT01ACA300 3TB which have great speed,still on SATA 2 and I'm getting speeds around 180mbps which is not bad and reading is around 90mbps

Its still better than Seagate which has have biggest failure rate and those Toshiba are not so bad,I'm using this as my scratch disk for Photoshop or 3DS MAX(textures and models etc) and holding my backups

I've tried only one Hybrid HDD,I've been bit disappointed with results in some S which I'm using and has been noisier than my Toshiba

You can have look on WD too,which has have great reviews just I wouldn't suggest Green,which are pretty poor

Thanks,Jura