Thread: Anyone familiar with hybrid drives?

The SSD component of this drive is only 4GB so probably not enough to put your entire system disk on.

I've been looking at a computer upgrade including an SSD. In my case it would be used for the operating system and for CAD files.

The SSD portion of the Seagate Momentus is only intended as a high speed buffer, not for installing the OS, etc.

By all accounts the Momentus is marginally faster than a conventional HDD, but not by much. If you google "Seagate Momentus review" there is quite a lot of info out there.

I recently rebuilt my desktop PC using a 64Gb SSD for the operating system and high-use programs, combined with a conventional 1000Gb HDD for storage. Goes like a bat out of hell now - windows loads up in no time at all, and programs respond instantaneously.

A word of warning; there is a lot of fiddling around required to get a fast, reliable system using an SSD, and it isn't for young players who don't understand the innermost workings of PCs (e.g. making changes to the registry, etc.). If you just treat the SSD like a normal drive and install windows on it, you'll probably have a total system meltdown in about 6 months. I have a mate who works in a retailer selling PC parts - he tells me that the rate of warranty return on SSDs is absolutely horrendous, and almost all down to user error. Unlike a conventional HDD you get no warning (e.g. funny noises...) when an SSD is about to fail. One day you switch on your PC and nothing happens because the OS has ceased to exist.......

Yeah, I've done a bit of poking around on the web about it. But the thing with tech reviews is they put a piece of HW through it's paces and base their reports on that.

Very rarely are any endurance issues raised and once or twice I've been caught out by compatibility problems that no-one mentioned. Hence my asking.

One of the nice things about the Momentus XT is that it appears to deliver near MLC SSD speeds with the stability of a mechanical. No need for slack space, TRIM or any of the other workarounds that a true SSD needs if it's to work to capacity.

And at less than $150 for 500MB, I could buy two to mirror my system drive... and still have change left over from the price of a single 280GB SSD!

(Not that I would... I currently have a ridiculous amount of TB locked up in RAID 10 for my data drives )

The solid state memory they use in these SSD units DOES have a definite life - 50,000 read/write cycles IIRC - and when one bit goes bad, get a new unit.

They also should come with some special software that forces the write cycles to occurr across all the registers, not just the first one, spreading out the 'wear' and increasing the time until failure.

And remember, that's an absolute number of read/writes, not an average like mechanical hard drives.

Point taken.

Methinks I'll wait until the 3rd gen of SSD and see what improvements come about.

Originally Posted by Skew ChiDAMN!!

Point taken.

Methinks I'll wait until the 3rd gen of SSD and see what improvements come about.

I'm agree about that idea.

I've tried hybrid drives and read many reviews about them. A lot of people says they aren't fast as they should. There're still some firmware and compatibility problems.

And since they're not so popular, when you've some problem, finding solution is real difficult.


A real SSD (for OS and temporary partition) & a terabytes harddisk is far faster and more reliable.