HDD/SSD or hybrid

shaun_from_Africa

If anyone was considering changing their laptop hard drive to solid state in order to increase the speed but were put off by the price, I have a recommendation.

A couple of months ago, I purchased a Seagate Momentus XT drive for my laptop.
The one I purchased is 750GB 7200rpm SATA, and it also has 8GB flash memory built in, and can be purchased for about £110

When starting my laptop from cold, it will be fully up and running in 20 seconds I can be on the internet 25 seconds after hitting the on button, and many of my installed programs also start far quicker than before.

My laptop is a Toshiba with an i5 and 6GB RAM and it was reasonably fast opening and running before, but this new HDD has vastly improved it.
I know that SSD's can be purchased for under £110, but not 750GB ones.

This drive has mostly very good reviews on Amazon and it's certainly worth considering if anyone is changing a HDD in the near future.

prowla

Interesting...

So basically it is a hard drive with a large cache.

shaun_from_Africa

Doesn't HDD cache memory normally get cleared when you shut the computer down?.
The 8GB flash memory on this particular drive doesn't, which is why it helps the startup speed and program opening speed.

Notmyrealname

shaun_from_Africa wrote: »

Doesn't HDD cache memory normally get cleared when you shut the computer down?.
The 8GB flash memory on this particular drive doesn't, which is why it helps the startup speed and program opening speed.

Standard HDD cache RAM is volatile so the power goes, it loses the contents. Hybrid drives use flash memory in addition to cache RAM and flash memory isn't volatile.