Toshiba 750 GB/1 TB Hybrid Drives Availability

Hi guys, so far Toshiba is offering their hybrids exclusively in their laptops. Any rumors as to when they'll be made available on the open market?

 

While the capacity (1TB) is interesting, I would not be holding my breath for this product (never saw a Toshiba HDD I liked - especially a 5400 RPM model).

But to directly answer your question: still no prices yet (maybe they're building up some inventory?) so probably in Q1 2013 would be my guess.

See:
New Products for PC Builders and Upgraders: October 2012


The Seagate Hybrids offer time proven reliability and the benefit of 7200 RPM spindle speeds until the nand is fully populated - true; at the cost of ~256GB extra capacity - which is a fair trade off imo (speed cannot be adjusted for - while capacity can).


The Tom's article sums it up perfectly:

See:
Hybrid Hard Drives: All About Compromise : In The Lab With Seagate's Momentus XT 750 GB Hybrid HDD

 

As you can see in my sig, I own a couple of Momentus XTs. However, I'm looking to change my configuration to a Samsung 840 SSD + 1 TB HDD.

 

On that subject, what are people's thoughts on having dual 750 GB Momentus XTs as opposed to SSD + 1 TB HDD?

 

More storage, less performance.

In reality, a hybrid drive as the storage drive on a system that uses an SSD as its primary is a fairly silly concept: everything you need to load quickly should be on the SSD and everything else should be on the spinner, so you're not likely to get much benefit from the SSD caching of a hybrid drive in that situation.

 

I actually have a Toshiba X875-Q7390 with a Toshiba 1TB hybrid Hard Drive and the Seagate 750GB Momentus XT Hard Drive. In several subjective tests they both have similar read speeds which is very snappy but the difference is in write speeds. The Toshiba drive is pretty slow while the Seagate is much more peppy obviously due to it's 7200rpm spindle speed. In WEI the Toshiba drive gets 5.3 and the Seagate drive gets 5.9. I hope this helps a bit.

 

Thanks for that direct comparison. If WEI can see a 0.6 difference - it will be easily noticeable in any real world use too.

Write speeds still do matter (Balance is the most important aspect in any 'system').

 

I plan to use the SSD as the primary OS drive and have games installed on the HDD. Would load times benefit from a Hybrid drive in that situation?

 

They would if the games fit on the cache (which they should, I think the cache is 32 GB these days). Load times would still be longer than running on the SSD though. How many games are you talking about? If you're using a 128 GB SSD you should be able to install 2-4 games on it without overfilling the drive (you want to try to keep it under 70% full), depending on their size. IMO, that should be enough at any time. If you're using Steam, other games can be installed on the HDD, or installed on the SSD and then cut and pasted onto the HDD for storage so you can just copy them back onto the SSD for quick installation.

For comparison, I've currently got Crysis and LA Noire installed on my desktop's system drive (Samsung 830 128 GB) and I'd be comfortable adding another 40+ GB to that drive before I felt like it was time to start managing it a bit more.

 

No, 32GB nand Cache is not offered on any drive I know currently (8GB is the max).

Also; what is silly is copying/pasting games back and forth from a HDD to an SSD - any inherent speed difference of the SSD is lost by doing this...

Using a Hybrid HDD for O/S or pure DATA/Program workloads will still give you all the benefits of the nand accelerated caching - to what degree depends on the actual files stored and how they are accessed day to day - but the caching doesn't 'turn off' if the O/S is installed elsewhere.

 

In that case, an 8GB cache isn't going to cache much of the data, so you might get one game loading at near-SSD speeds on it but not two. Everything I've read has said that the cache isn't really as fast as most SSD's, probably due to controller issues, or because only part of the program gets cached. I'm no expert, I've just always heard that hybrid drive caches aren't as fast as full-blown SSD's. Even with fairly conservative partitioning on a 128 GB OS drive, you should still be able to install 40-60GB worth of games that will load at least as quickly as the 8GB that the hybrid drive caches.

I only recommend copying games back and forth between a hard drive and an SSD if the games on the hard drive are being stored to avoid long download times in the event of a reinstallation down the line. If I'm regularly playing a game, it'll go on the SSD unless load times are not an issue (as with Phantasmagoria 2 on my desktop). I wouldn't recommend juggling games back and forth like this if they're getting regular playtime.