SATA Hybrid?

[Fenon]

I just noticed the Seagate Momentus XT 500GB Hybrid SATA-II 2.5" 7200RPM 32MB on the Overclockers website. I looks like it's almost as fast as an SSD at a much smaller price, a quarter I believe and was just 5 seconds slower to boot the PC, 14 seconds faster than a 7200 RPM drive. It was 10 seconds slower over the full test than the SSD and over a minute faster than the 7200. I've read something about it making the things you use a lot run fast (i.e. booting, programs, favourite games) but the things you rarely use run slower.

The Seagate Momentus XT 500GB is £99.99 and I was going to get the Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache for £71.99. Wondering which I should get.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showpr...14&subcat=1894

[karamazovmm]

It incorporates 4g of nand SSD, the thing is the performance is about as good as you have a fairly routine in the PC.

It uses something very similar as the fetching system of browser, the higher the visit of a site, the faster it is accessed, due to it being more or less in cache.

The problem and the clear bottleneck is that there is only 4g, you could get butloads of memory and use a program to '''store'' some programs in it, it is cheaper too.

[Fenon]

Ok thanks, not sure that I quite understood all of that. But I guess it means stick with the normal HDD, or proper SSD.

[Freddie]

Personally I think there a good idea and surprised nobody else has gone down this route yet as IMO it's the way forward as SSD's will never be cheap enough as demand for ever increasing capacities increase. At the end of the day its a basic hard drive with a supersized cache the idea behind it is the hard drive works out what apps you use the most and stores those files in the 4gb cache for faster access.

[karamazovmm]

it is a good idea.

[mrcrusty]

The idea is very good, and I think hybrid flash/mechanical drives will be used before SSDs will become cheap enough for typical use and storage purposes.