1 SSD is the only thing to buy. As the price gap narrows, why save money for complexity? Also, as this adds another storage layer is there another set of firmware to go through for the additional layer?

2 I replaced my old HD with a hybrid 2 months ago - great! I got 750gb of space for a tad over a hundred bucks, and it's a bit snappier. It's not a real ssd, but for the size/price, the speed improvement was a great bonus.

3 I'm a chicken hawk and you're a chicken. Now are ya gonna come along quiet like or am I gonna have ta muss ya up some?

4 An all SSD 1T is gonna run $500+.  That's a huge price delta.

5 For dolts like me, could you describe a practical scenario where SSD is beneficial? (I tried to sound as smart as possible while possibly asking a stupid question. It's been my life strategy all along.)

6 So it's pure speed? Would it speed up steaming? Would it decrease data usage while streaming? (gave up trying to sound smart)

7 The link says the equal-priced SSD drive is 128Gb; about 1/8 as much storage. But the SSHD also has some sort of flash memory ... does the flash have a write cycle life? Is there a menu that lets the user specify what is to be retained in flash, and maybe write-locked? This could be very useful.

8 Opus, you should always keep in mind you know a lot more about this stuff than I do. On the other hand, a wet paper sack of cheap Chinese hammers knows more about this stuff than I do.

9 Would it speed up steaming?

Not unless you're streaming the same thing repeatedly.  If some chunk of data isn't accessed repeatedly its not going to stash it in the solid state memory.

Things it can improve are boot times, browser/app load times and such, and virtual memory performance if the system memory is over-committed and swapping starts

10 ... does the flash have a write cycle life?

Yep, but its gotten better over the years.  I presume (hope? is the way I'd design one) these hybrids would do a "soft" fail-over to ordinary drive behavior if they start to sense the solid state memory going bad.

There's still some fast RAM cache on them too, so a fail-over wouldn't result in abysmal performance.

11 Well then teej, I had better study up to keep one step ahead of you. :/

12 Got it Purp and thanks. But what I actually asked was "does it speed up steaming. See, I take a steam while I'm waiting for my Commodore 9000 to boot up and I get pretty pruney. (I'm kidding of course. I get nervous in these situations. Ignore me and it will pass.)

13 Is there a menu that lets the user specify what is to be retained in flash, and maybe write-locked?

The drive presents itself to the system as an ordinary SATA.

What you're talking about, which would be cool, is where the OS is aware that its SSD and can communicate preferences to the drive.

With a pure SSD that had a direct motherboard interface mapped into the PC's memory space (like the old paged window EMS memory scheme), that sort of thing would be possible and very cool...and VERY VERY fast.  But it would take an OS that was aware of the memory mapped drive.

14 No, it doesn't speed up steaming - these are pretty low power drives that don't generate a lot of heat ;->

You need something like the old full height Seagate ST410800 SCSI drives for proper steaming - they suck about 35W.

15 Probably not necessary Opus. By the time I take one step forward on computery stuff I'm always 12 steps more behind. It's always been just learn the software for whichever lab instrument I'm running and the lab info mgt system and spreadsheets for entering data. One of the many reasons I'm such a failure. And now it's time to get ready for my start all over again,,, again, job. Have a good day folks. One foot in front of the other.

16 meh. I have a Solid State Drive for boot/system files and real drives for data storage. I have had trouble with the normal SSD drive writing files at shut down. I shut down windows (XP) and turn of power to the system. I have to wait up to 15 minutes to turn off power or I get file errors. This hybrid you speak of is the worst of both worlds. Though it might be passable in laptops. or something...

17 I shut down windows (XP) and turn of power to the system. I have to wait up to 15 minutes to turn off power or I get file errors.

That drive's firmware sounds like its broken.  Check with the manufacturer for updates. 

It sounds like the drive has a too long latency setting on RAM cache flush to the SSD memory. 

18 http://preview.tinyurl.com/cpg6e6w This baby will really steam along!

19 Installed a SSD (non hybrid) as a boot drive about a year ago in a machine several years old, and I'm thrilled with it. If you're after speed and saving some money - and you have a couple drive slots - use one for the SSD boot and the other for a traditional storage drive. I spent $100 an a 128G Crucial M4 and another $100 on a 1Terabyte WD internal drive. Boot times went from over 2 minutes to 20 seconds. Programs open and operate noticeably faster. Teh interwebz seems faster, probably because data processing of websites is speeded up. 

Laptop people, try a straight SSD as big as you can afford - if you need more storage get a portable USB drive. As others have said, large SSDs aren't cost effective yet.

And btw, the read-write life cycle FUD on SSDs is BS. The technology will change and you'll be running a lazer-crystal-etched-hyper-something before the SSD wears out. Run the piss out of it.

20 That drive's firmware sounds like its broken. Check with the manufacturer for updates. The drive I have has a disturbing number of failure reports (blah!) on various web sites. I actually downloaded the firmware updates but was unable to install them. I am currently hoping the drive will fail before the warranty runs out. On the plus side the computer boots really quick (when it is working right) and runs everything fast. (I have XP stripped down to just 19 or 20 processes showing in the task manager)

21 Xavier - web stuff is likely faster because cache is probably located on your SSD drive. I think your scenario is the way I would go.

22 And btw, the read-write life cycle FUD on SSDs is BS. The technology will change and you'll be running a lazer-crystal-etched-hyper-something before the SSD wears out. Run the piss out of it. Hell yeah! Another twenty years and that thing will be all the rage, for playing my music in my electric car...

23 I use Seagate Momentus Hybrids minimum, unless I use SSDs.... Been happy with 'em thus far.

24 Another thing that can improve performance on some machines is compressing certain system files and things that are largely only read rather than written

If you got an excess of CPU horsepower and a slow drive, the decompression is faster than reading the longer uncompressed files.

I just went through a Vista machine I just setup and compressed a bunch of stuff in the \windows directory and it boots in about 10-15sec now...and that's off a dog shit slow 5400rpm 40G Western Digital drive.

After compressing, run a full defrag.

25 I don't compress any drives. It has always been a performance inhibitor and will always be one. Disk space is cheap. I did splurge for a maxim ram for my main system (XP) . 4 Gb (yeah, I know, not all used) so no disk caching. I can run 20-50 firefox tabs with no problem. I may be able to do more but I have never tried.

26 It has always been a performance inhibitor and will always be one.

Not true.  I did benchmarking while at IBM that proved definitively it can speed up systems with slow drives and a lot of CPU horsepower.  By a lot of horsepower, I mean a 25mhz 386, with an old/slow ESDI/MFM drive.

If you compress stuff that gets WRITTEN, then yes it'll hurt.

In a modern multi-core scenario, I suspect even a scenario with writes won't hurt as bad as it did in the uniprocessor era.  Its pretty rare for the average user to saturate two cores.

27 Do your research before you purchase a hybrid hard drive. The performance of certain hybrids are no better than a quality spindle drive. TechReport's review of Seagate Hybrid Drive

28 Sigh. Well, crap. No linky love for me. Plug the last sentence into Google and read the review.

29 If you compress stuff that gets WRITTEN, then yes it'll hurt. If your hard drive is compressed, it must be written. (it must be done?)

30 Or instead of just read, read and decompressed.

31 The beauty of the Momentus XT is that it has some smarts underneath it which identify your most frequently accessed HDD sectors and stores them in the SSD side. It's viewed and accessed as one logical drive. SO if you're a weird reboot freak, it'll start storing the sectors pertaining to boot up. If you're a power-user, it'll store the sectors for Photoshop, or what have you.

32 If your hard drive is compressed, it must be written.

Once. One time compression costs don't mean shit over the next thousand reads.

33

This has a five year life, give or take - but it's good stuff.

 

For $180 you already can get a 0.25TB (250GB) SSD on Amazon.  Five years from now that will be terabytes - and that will be more than enough.

 

The days of "running out of disk space" are already just about over.  1TB is lasting people a long time, even with music and movies.  In 5 years you'll get a 5TB SSD for under $200.

 

For now, however, the hybrids are great.

34 The performance of certain hybrids are no better than a quality spindle drive.

High RPM = faster failure and increased heat.

eBay is full of used "untested" "as-is" 15k RPM drives that are dead. 

I've never had a high performance drive last more than a few year.  I've had 5400rpm ones last over 10 years.

35 #16

Your problem is XP. It doesn't know how to work properly with SSDs and never will. If you want to use the current generation of hardware to its intended extent you have to be on Win7 or Win8. Microsoft stopped retrofitting new technologies to XP about five years ago.

36 Hybrid drives had a shot but Seagate chickened out by not going after the market aggressively with far larger NVCACHE (non-volatile cache, which is what this is) volume. People got impatient waiting for a hybrid they were convince had enough cache capacity. They either spent the money for a full SSD or have held out for one of the newer models that handles things better with a flash cache separate from the hard drive.

Hybrid drives provide the simplest form of brute force caching. The OS is oblivious and the sole intelligence applied is within the drive itself. It only understands things at the sector and block level. There are much better methods available when the OS and/or a human gets involved.

The next step up from a hybrid drive is a hybrid system where a small SSD, typically 32 GB, is used as a transparent cache. This allows for OS involvement and brings things up to the file level. For a while the mSATA connector was going to be the standard for this in laptops and desktops but a newer format has since been proposed and adopted. This is a longer and narrower form factor that was judged to be easier to squeeze laptop designs. In a desktop it will look like another memory stick with a connector at one end rather than along its length. The functionality is the same but without the bulk from being in a 2.5" drive casing.

Anyway, this approach, which is already shipping in higher-end products, gets a bit closer tot he benefits of a full SSD boot and app volume without the expense of a drive large to hold all of your OS and applications.

The next step up, which improves on the full SSD bot/app volume, isn't available on Windows yet. Apple pumped some real smarts into SSD usage with their Fusion technology. This provides the transparency of a cache system while still delivering the full capacity of the drives to the user.

In Fusion, if you have a 256 GB SSD and a 1 TB platter drive, it appears to the user as a single 1.25 TB volume. This works at the application level with the OS completely managing what should live on the SSD and what is better left on the conventional hard drive. The user doesn't have to do anything and gets the full benefits of an SSD.

It's seems pretty likely Microsoft and/or Intel will have a version of this sometime late this year but for now Apple has the best OS support of combined SSD and hard drive systems.

37 Hybrid drives are really only a stopgap towards SSD's, but the real problem with the hybrid drives is that if the micro-SSD controller dies, the entire drive is junk even if the physical side is still good.  Probably in 4 years mechanical drives will be dead, I've got a first generation SSD and it still has 95% of the life to it.  Hell, even with the pagefile on the drive there isn't an issue in excessive writes.

For those looking for an SSD watch tigerdirect and newegg for sales.  Hmm 5 weeks ago or so they had 240GB drives on sale for $149, made by OCZ and Crucial.

38 Don't bother with hybrid. Get a cheap SSD (~64-128 GB depending on your price range) and install your OS to it. Get a large HDD (>1TB), or take your old one, and use it for storing media and large program files. An SSD is the single best upgrade you can make to a computer.

39 #37

Actually, the Seagate hybrids are designed to handle failure of the NVCACHE. Any SSD already has provision to block off bad sectors and gradually shrink over time if the usage intensity is high enough to create a notable difference from the users perspective. (Disk utilities have long done this with hard drive and a bunch of bad sectors are typically blocked off from the factory and more over the life of the drive.)

If the cache controller dies the drive would just treat it if the entire flash block had gone bad and no longer had enough capacity to duplicate any sectors. OTOH, with integration of the controller electronics, it's pretty unlikely such a failure is going to be limited to just the cache controller. You would need to connect another controller board to recover the contents of the drive. This used to be something you could do pretty easily (I had a part time job in the 90s for a company that did data recovery) but the level of integration nowadays means you'd want to RMA it with the maker.