Hybrid drive benefits as mass storage?

Are there any benefits to using a hybrid drive as mass storage? i have a 500gb 7200rpm momentus XT with 4gb NAND memory and i use it as storage while my SSD has the OS on it. so would the performance, i.e. the speed at which it can cut/paste data and read data (e.g. movies) be better than a standard 7200RPM drive? Thanks

 

No. It will perform just like an average 7200rpmg 500GB 2.5" drive.

 

The answer really depends on what and how often you read from the Momentus XT.

See here for related posts:

- http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...-5-750gb-7200rpm-benchmark-5.html#post8191656

- http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...t-upgrades/655634-ssd-hybrid.html#post8426727

- http://forum.notebookreview.com/sager-clevo/649060-ssd-vs-hybrid-3.html#post8355218

 

Yes, you will see an increase in read and write times compared to if you were using a conventional HDD. See the hybrid drive wikipedia page for more information on how they work and why you will see a speed up.

 

This, it will only speed up your most often used files, for example a part of your music library.

 

A hybrid drive shines as the system drive, aside from that, it doesn't give you any benefit. It doesn't help with writes to the disk, and can only help with reads. But the read speed of a movie or music file is never going to bottleneck anything, and even then, less than 1% of the full drive's capacity can even be cached on the flash memory at any one time.

 

Qing Dao I would suggest you read how Hybrid drives work because there are a couple of conceptual errors in your statement. You are correct in that they won't help as much as if they were the primary HDD, but they are not useless as a secondary storage drive.

 

They aren't useless but will give little advantage over a traditional spinner unless you read the same 4GB (or 8GB) of data over and over again.

 

The extra money you would spend to buy the Momentus XT would be better spent on a non-hybrid hard drive with larger capacity.

 

OP didn't say he was looking to purchase a secondary. OP was just wondering if he would get any increase in performance compared to a conventional because they already HAVE a XT.

 

Can you please point out the conceptual errors, because I am not following you?

 

i have the xt momentus, because when i got my clevo laptop, the seller had a promotion on where i get the XT momentus for same price as the regular drive, so i thought, why not. i have a 128gb ssd as OS drive

 

Primarilly the benefit will be in folder and metadata access. Since every time you open a folder on the drive you are accessing that data along with thumbnails etc. These become the most accessed and also they tend to be small files so the cache really works best for this. You will see little bennefit over a traditional drive other than this. Now if you had a large SSD and really used the storage device very little I would say don't bother but where you ave the 128GB as boot and programs the XT as a data drive works well......................

 

I'd consider the Hybrid drive as a standard HDD with a massive cache that can't normally be written in addition to the normal RAM cache. I've read reports it speeds up random reads a great deal due to the aggressive caching of frequently accessed data to the SSD partition, this is of greatest benefit to boot times since this is when there are typically loads of random accesses to small files. I think the Seagate algorithm prevents normal write caching to preserve the endurance of the NAND cells (at least with the new XT drives with 8gb NAND), it will only write to the NAND if it senses you use particular files very often, I think the write speeds seem faster because the 7200RPM HDD side is simply a very good HDD.

 

I thought that was pretty much clear in the follow up posts I had linked to.

In regards to statement that MP3s do not push through enough bandwidth to tax the drive, yes that is true. However, if your MP3 player supports MP3 embedded images, it should have no problem waiting for images to load as you peruse your library. Also, browsing through thousands of stock images is something handled by the XT. For more examples of niche use cases, CAD and software development libraries, along with storage locations for virtual machines all can take advantage of the Momentus XTs SSD read-only caching.

It all comes down to my original reply... Depends on what you put on it.

 

My guess is it is this error, "It will perform just like an average 7200rpmg 500GB 2.5" drive." which is not true when you have data used over and over again.