Has anyone used one of these SSD/HDD hybrid drives?


Rajahal

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Seagate Momentus XT ST95005620AS 500GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s with NCQ Solid State Hybrid Drive -Bare Drive

 

Basically it is a 4 GB SSD and a 500 GB 7200rpm drive combined into one.  The drive is supposed to learn your data usage patterns over time and allocate it's resources accordingly.

 

Sounds like a good concept, but the reviews are pretty mixed.  I doubt it would really be of much use in an unRAID environment.  I'm curious about how it would perform in a laptop compared to my standard 60 GB SSD.

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It performs very weill in my new used Dell XPS M1710 laptop.

The latop had a hitachi 100GB 7200 RPM drive and I saw, measured and felt improved performance the moment I put it in.

After a few reboots, the system ran faster once it started to learn usage patterns.

it's not quite as fast as an SSD, but it's much faster then a regular drive.

The hitachi had read benchmarks with HDTUNE at 60MB/s.

The Seagate Momentus XT had read benchmarks with HDTUNE at 100MB/s.

 

I would have used a SSD, only this laptop is slated for music production and audio recording with Sonar and Pro Tools. So I need lots of storage that will not cause performance issues with a SSD.

 

I'm really happy with this drive.

I've sold a few of my laptop 2.5" drives in order to purchase this one and it's worked out well.

 

I could see this being useful for a cache drive if you were going to use part of the cache drive for continuous application usage. Other then that it probably does not do much for unRAID.

 

I'll probably buy one for my other laptop as a second supplementary drive for Media.

It will let me fit an imaged backup of the SSD and Media all in one when I need it.

 

As far as usage in a HTPC. I would probably still go with a dual drive approach.

SDD for OS and APPS.

Large 3.5" platter drives for data storage.

If I could only fit one drive, I would probably stick with SSD and use the network for data access.

For a latop it's a toss up with SSD for high speed read access or Momentus XT for large file read/write access.

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I have this drive as my primary boot drive in my main workstation... bought primarily just to "play" with something and because my system was feeling HDD bound on startup, and because my boot partition usage is > 128GB and I don't want to pay for a 256GB+ sized SSD at this time.

 

It has definitely shortened total time to desktop (boot + login and acquiescence to the point I can start up apps and get working) by about 1/3 to 1/2... to the point I'm no longer annoyed... which I guess is the ultimate goal.  I'd say I can get working in my polluted desktop / user profile environment almost as fast I can on my other boot partition (purely for games) which is clean (except for games  ;) ).  And yeah, when I first put it in, I did notice it took several restarts over some period of time to realize its full potential.

 

It wouldn't fool me into thinking it's an SSD though; the SSD I have in my HTPC is clearly much snappier than anything I've seen.

 

And I'd agree that unless you like overpaying $ per GB, it wouldn't really have much use in an unRAID environment.

 

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