Which is better a hybrid hard drive or turbo memory?

Dell offers a hybrid hard drive and Lenovo offer turbo memory, but neither offer both. Which one is better?

 

Turbo memory and a 7200rpm hard disk is best. Hybrids are only available with 5400 rpm I think. What hybrids does Dell have? Do they only have 256MB flash? 256MB is too small to make a differance.

 

What about one of those newer ExpressCard SSDs?

 

Can Turbo memory be combined with a hybrid hard drive.

 

no, its one or the other with Vista

 

you dont wan't that flash on your motherboard. once it is gone, thats it. with a hybrid hard drive, at least you have the opportunity to replace it when it fails.

plus- you will always get more performance from adding more RAM than you ever will from adding flash memory.

 

I'd go with neither. Vista at the moment doesn't seem to have a noticeable gain with either one. That isn't to say they suck, just they are both in their infancy at the moment.

Hybrid drives seem good but give it time... as wave has said, its really only available in 5400rpm versions. I'd want a 7200rpm version hybrid. Plus 256mb flash on it seems small.

I'd say go with the laptop that has the features you want, not factoring in hybrid/turbo memory.

 

Turbo Memory is a module you add via a pci express mini port so its easily replacable.

I agree that Ram does more to boost system performance, but turbo memory and ram are for different purposes. Its supposed to boost boot and program loading times. The jury is still out on how well it does that.

 

No offense, but offering more RAM does not always boost performance. If your RAM isn't used up to start with adding more RAM will do absolutely nothing.

 

I'd go for hybrid hard drive as it is said to save power by spinning less for data access, but there's a couple of trade-offs to be made.

RAM will remove the usefulness of Turbo Memory if you have enough Ram.

 

This is incorrect. As someone already posted, if the OS won't load data into memory, it doesn't matter if you have 1gb or 4gb. The use of turbo memory and the other SSD implementations is that the drivers can be more intelligent then your memory stack, and even open the API's up for developers to let you use them for things like your clipboard, leaving your faster system ram for true applications.

There is some rumours floating around that Vista was released without the software that it needs to intelligently use the flash memory, which would be why the results aren't that impressive. I know the Intel engineering samples have been noticeably faster with a 1gb Robson card, then without.

That all being said, I'm personally leaning more towards the hybrid drives since that leaves me in control of which machine I'm interested in buying. For instance, I'm very interested in the Clevo D900C DTR notebook. This machine is built using Conroe desktop parts which means Robson isn't available. I could however use the Hybrid drives.

 

http://www.techspot.com/news/25550-hp-says-no-to-intels-turbo-memory.html

HP on the other hand ran some tests and saw little improvement, in fact, the greatest improvement came as a result of adding more actual RAM to the system.


"We added 1GB of RAM and saw a much higher improvement in performance compared to using any of the ReadyBoost or Robson technology," Doddridge said. He added that: "If you have enough system RAM in the system already, ReadyBoost doesn't give you a lot."


I will like to verify my claim with an article. But given the Turbo Memory technology is still relatively young, so let's give it more time.

We're still leaning for hybrid hard drives. Solid State Disks anyone?

 

Nobody ever said Robson would be as fast as ram though.. that's the part I think people are ignoring or missing.. Robson is faster then swap / paging file, uses less battery life then a swap / paging file and offers developers an SDK to use it for custom buffering like large clipboards in photoshop. (Rather then eat up the system memory for the clip board, you can use the flash memory)

When it comes to system RAM, I don't care how you try and make a benchmark show, but your system will only use what it thinks it needs and then stops (look at when you boot up your system, is your full 2gb used? That would be a better use of the resources).

Free memory isn't speeding anything up on anyones computer, and developers don't have control over the memory to help fill it up. That is all based on the OS.

As I've said in the other threads on Robson, whether anyone likes it or not, it's a bridge technology to get us to larger cheaper SSD's, just like the mass production of flash memory lead to things like iPods.

 

I'm sure I've seen some Laptops that have flash memory for ReadyBoost in Vista that are replacable. To be honest, that is a pretty frikking stupid idea on the manufacturer's part to make it built in and non replacable given how flash memory only has so many write cycles. Yes, yes, they tout the 'technology' that writes on all parts of the flash memory equally so that it takes longer to wear out, but still, it wears out.

I have noticed that when I have 1 GB of ram, ReadyBoost made a noticeable difference, but when I got 2 GB of ram recently, it barely made a difference for me at all.

 

Here is a review where samsung 5200rpm 160gb hybrid (256mb) is fast as the 7,200rpm Seagate Momentus 7200.1

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/custompc/reviews/115580/samsung-flashon-160gb.html

so its looks good. i think it will get better when the flash gets bigger like 1 or 2 gb !

anyway...

 

I'll put it this way then. Since Robson only works with Vista I'll assume we're talking that OS. If you have $40 to spend and a laptop with 1 gig of ram, you'll get more performance out of adding a 1 gig ram stick than adding Robson.

However, I do think Robson shows promise in reducing HD seek time and extending battery life so I personally added it to my laptop rather than going to 3 gigs of Ram.

Sorry for not explaining myself better.

 

There aren't any manufacturers that make Intel Turbo Memory "built in and non replaceable." Intel Turbo Memory is replaceable. You can buy it on-line from a number of places for about $25 - Here's one: http://www.antonline.com/p_NVCPEMWR001G110-GP_315822.htm

 

To be fair, ReadyBoost and Turbomemory are not the same thing. If you have enough RAM, Readyboost doesn't give you a lot. However, Turbomemory may.

 

why not just buy a normal HD for now, and as full SSD's come out, swap the drives?