Simply put a Hybrid HDD is a mechanical drive with some NAND flash on it that is automatically used by the drive to store data for quicker access. A hybrid drive really just attempts to do what my setup of two drives (SSD + HDD) does manually: put small, frequently used data on NAND flash and put larger, less frequently used data on platters.
In theory you get the best of both worlds, the overall capacity of a HDD and (most of the time) the performance of an SSD... Seagate's Momentus XT should become the standard hard drive in any notebook shipped... Compared standard 2.5" drives, the Momentus XT will set you back an additional $50 - 90 depending on the capacity point. The added cost is absolutely worth it.
Is this similar in concept to what the latest version of eBoostr (http://www.eboostr.com/) does (and to a lesser degree ReadyBoost)?Kinda - ReadyBoost and eBoostr have the advantage (dunno if they're using it, though!) of being able to know "stuff about files", whereas putting the flash cache on the harddrive means the disk firmware can only look at sector addresses.-Darwin (September 15, 2010, 11:29 AM)
Heh, heh - I'm just wondering if I should splash out for one of these drives...?Personally, I wouldn't - instead, go for a decent-sized SSD (64gig is enough for Windows + apps + documents/sourcecode with room to spare - the Vertex2 and 80gig intel X25-M offerings are almost affordable), and a decent mechanical drive for your bulk storage.-Darwin (September 15, 2010, 11:55 AM)
mouser, the largest onboard RAM you'll see on a harddrive today is 32MB (perhaps 64MB?),-f0dder (September 15, 2010, 12:50 PM)
64 GB should be more than enough, really, but your space requirements may vary based on your usage patterns. If you like to have several big games installed, or use several operating systems (either virtualized or not), I hope your wallet is as fat as the SSD you may need in such case. Otherwise, get a big mechanical drive for secondary storage as f0dder suggests (or a NAS), and move your personal files there. You can even set up folder junctions pointing to the secondary drive if you run out of space (hi, humongous "steamapps" folder).
How come moving "My Documents" to another drive is messy for you, Deo?-Lashiec (September 15, 2010, 06:03 PM)
Wouldn't having a flash buffer make the drive more likely to fail earlier? Flash is rated for a relatively small number of read/write cycles compared to current HDD technology.It's a bit hard to get any hard numbers, and it depends on the quality as well as type (MLC vs SLC) flash. I wouldn't expect any problems with normal use, though - and if the firmware is any good, bad blocks will simply be ignored for any further caching.-mbrazil (September 17, 2010, 10:53 PM)