SSD / HD hybrid - Worth it?

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I'm searching for a new laptop hard drive. I saw something I never saw before on newegg. hybrid drive. they say its a drive that performs "like" a ssd. Do you know anyone who used this? Would you agree that it performs like a ssd? What components make it act this way?

Seagate Hybrid Drives ST1000LM014 1TB MLC/8GB 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s NCQ 2.5" Laptop SSHD -Bare Drive - Newegg.com


my laptop only has sata 3.0 so I'm going to skip this one. I'm looking for a big hard to fit a elitebook 6930p. specs say there's a additional optional bay for a hd. I haven't looked to confirm this yet.

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/13061_na/13061_na.pdf

can you recommend a hd for the elitebook 6930p? looking for some thing to hold my video files
 
It basically has a small SSD on the drive that it uses as a large cache, I believe. they've been around for a really long time; surprised you haven't seen them before.

Have seen them used before and would like to get one for my laptop one of these days so I don't have to sacrifice storage space.

Not sure how the performance compares to an actual SSD though.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk
 
I thought about getting one of those dual drives to replace the 1TB spinner in my laptop. After some investigation, I decided against it. The 2 drives share the same SATA connector and the machine will only see the ssd side until some proprietary WD software is loaded to enable the machine to see and access the hdd side. Because the 2 share the same SATA port, performance is hindered when the system needs to access both sides of the dual drive at the same time. The included ssd is not a particularly high performance drive and the spinner portion is only a 5400rpm drive.

I ended up going with one of these: Samsung 840 EVO 500GB. Less storage, yes, but I felt 500GB was all I needed for a laptop and this drive perfroms better than the dual drive. I also got a killer deal, $209.25, including an extended warranty. On top of that, I had a $200 gift card so it only cost me $9.25 out-of-pocket.
 
The supplied bandwidth is more than plenty for both, although I agree that using their proprietary software sucks but it is a one of a kind drive. In a laptop though, when you have 1 drive bay and want a separate SSD and HDD for storage it's pretty invaluable. Way better than the cache drives that Seagate provide.

In a laptop most all 2.5" drives that are large are actually 5400RPM, and it saves on battery life too. SSD performance is irrelevant as long as IOPS are high.
 
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