Where to buy Hybrid hard drives

Russel245

I've never wanted to move to a solid state since they are so small unless you want to sign over your wallet, bank account and soul to get one...

But I saw a review of some hybrid drives showing a happy medium between cost and functionality, but I just went to buy one and all I could find were seagate hybrids on overclockers. I couldn't find anything on scan.co.uk or ebuyer.


Are seagate the only current manufacturers of hybrid drives?

And does anybody know any other e-shops with a bit more selection?

Thanks in advance guys.

swvillafan

The 500gb model can be had on Ebuyer for approx £95, link here.

JasX

Are you talking about a Desktop or Laptop....

If Desktop don't you get far more for your money getting two separate drives for the same price £60 for a few tens of GB SSD and £40 for a 1TB conventional drive?

you can then fit your whole OS on the SSD and its small size will help as you'll not be able to clutter your OS partition installing a load of extra junk to it

sacabuca

What is the difference between SSD and hybrid?

Russel245

JasX wrote: »

Are you talking about a Desktop or Laptop....

If Desktop don't you get far more for your money getting two separate drives for the same price £60 for a few tens of GB SSD and £40 for a 1TB conventional drive?

you can then fit your whole OS on the SSD and its small size will help as you'll not be able to clutter your OS partition installing a load of extra junk to it

It's a desktop, the reason I haven't done that is because I wanted to install programs on the SSD, but on a fairly new install of windows I already have around 80Gb of pure software on my main drive, so looking for any kind of future proofing without having to constantly shift installs will require a £200+ SSD, which just isn't viable for me.


Edit:

sacabuca wrote: »

What is the difference between SSD and hybrid?

So far as I understand it; a hybrid drive uses a small SSD as a buffed for a traditional HDD, I'm not 100% of the mechanics of how this actually speeds the process of data transfer out but they do seem to produce much greater transfer rates than standard HDDs

DatabaseError

Russel245 wrote: »

...., so looking for any kind of future proofing without having to constantly shift installs will require a £200+ SSD, which just isn't viable for me.

the drive seems a smart idea, but I'm not convinced...
I have a 64Gb SSD, which holds my OS (7x64) office, browsers, utils etc...and I even popped on black ops leaving around 25Gb free.
Other games and utils are getting shoved onto my 500gb 7200rpm mechanical drive, and my downloads/storage is on a 2Tb 5200rpm mechanical drive. This combination works well for me, and I can't imagine a reason for the SSD ever becoming full.

A 32 Gb SSD, on the other hand, would be a struggle for me, I wouldn't have been able to fit as many apps/utils onto it as I'd like...

The drive you're looking at looks a bit gimmiky to me..2 things to go wrong, though i do like the idea of self-optimisation, it can surely not compete with intelligent installation.

Russel245

DatabaseError wrote: »

the drive seems a smart idea, but I'm not convinced...
I have a 64Gb SSD, which holds my OS (7x64) office, browsers, utils etc...and I even popped on black ops leaving around 25Gb free.
Other games and utils are getting shoved onto my 500gb 7200rpm mechanical drive, and my downloads/storage is on a 2Tb 5200rpm mechanical drive. This combination works well for me, and I can't imagine a reason for the SSD ever becoming full.

A 32 Gb SSD, on the other hand, would be a struggle for me, I wouldn't have been able to fit as many apps/utils onto it as I'd like...

The drive you're looking at looks a bit gimmiky to me..2 things to go wrong, though i do like the idea of self-optimisation, it can surely not compete with intelligent installation.

That's true, but it's a gaming PC and with games taking up to 10Gb of space, -OS I could be looking at a total of 4-5 games at any one point. Installing other games to an alternative drive just seems like a waste of the SSD. Thus I'd be looking at a 120gig+ drive.

Not to mention all other applications that I would prefer to run off the SSD.

I know what you mean about the gimmiky feel to them, my initial thought was how could it possibly be faster to go through another medium before transfering, however the benchmarks I have seen of them put them a long long way ahead of HDDs.


All that said, the benchmark I saw was from the manufacturer... Though without outright lying about their product, there wasn't too much of a way the test could be off.

JJ_Egan

I would have thought that the 4GB is in effect only a faster than normal cache and would show no improvement or very little if you tried to use to put the OS on it .

Benchmarks are showing theoretical drive speed not in use drive speed as more factors come into play . No good having a 100mph drive when the FSB chokes it to 15mph .

jje

Russel245

I found a link to the comparison, I was skeptical before seeing this:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kss98VdhSj0&NR=1


I know it's from the manufacturer (seagate) but it doesn't seem wrong.

If anybody has some reasoning that might suggest otherwise I'd like to hear it (and save me some cash xD).

I would rather see an independent benchmark though. : /

DatabaseError

Russel - you do understand the only part of gaming your SSD is gonna affect is loading times, right?
Loading a game from my SSD is roughly instantaneous (most of the pause between clicking the icon and playing are imposed by the game developers with videos etc..), while my from my mech drives takes a second or 2...I think very few people expect to use SSD as their primary storage drive, and most use a setup similar to mine, the OS and selected apps on the SSD, the big stuff on a relatively fast mechanical. I suspect the hybrid would still be loading much of the games from the mechanical side of it, especially as the SSD is so small.

savemoney

That drive is £89.98 at scan or 1p more at Dabs

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/500gb-seagate-st95005620as-momentus-xt-hybrid25-hdd-sata-3gb-s-7200rpm-32mb-cache-11-ms-ncq

http://www.dabs.com/products/seagate-500gb-momentusxt-hybrid-sata-300-2-5--7200rpm-32mb-70JK.html