Is this as Cool as I think it is?

Newegg.com - Seagate Momentus XT ST750LX003 750GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache 2.5" SATA 6.0Gb/s Solid State Hybrid Drive -Bare Drive

I have a 750gb 5400rpm HD in my core i7 laptop and I need a new one. I was going to go full ssd but I cant afford it. So i stumbled upon this beauty. Ive never heard of one of these before but it seems genius.

So my question is, does this work pretty well? Reliability? What do you guys think about it before i shell out $250 for it?

Thanks guys!

 

I have heard good things about them. As a matter of fact i am saving up for that one.

 

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http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/seagate_momentus_xt_750gb_hybrid/12.htm

It is good, but you can't really compare it to a true SSD... now if the SS portion would be on the order of GigaBytes, I think you could do some interesting things... About 80GB of SSD, 750GB mechanical, and some intelligence could probably use up some of the 6GB/s bandwidth

 

If you were talking about this drive then you made a typo. It has 8GB SSD.
Also this SATA-6 is needed only for cache. So cached data would not deal with SATAII bottleneck.

 

I think we are on the same page, but the point I was trying to make is that until the SSD portion gets a bit larger, the throughput would barely utilize the SATA III capabilities... or at least with a little intelligence, you could indeed approach SSD performance.

 

Oh, I see. But if you were right then 3.5 HDD would never be SATAIII. They use new standart because cache benefits a little bit from new interface or should benefit. However many tests of different models shew that only some cache is really faster than 250-300 MBp/s

SLC should use higher speeds so this is the reason of SATAIII. 8GB is MUCH MUCH MORE than usual 32-64 MB of cache.

 

Its not just cache like on a normal drive (which is crap). This has full SSD read speeds on the portion of files you access the most and it is retained even after powering down the system. In addition to this SSD it still has the regular 32mb ram cache like a standard hard drive. It is identical to a Seagate 7200.4 but with the SSD portion added to the mainboard and double the cache (16mb vs 32mb)

The hard drive is divided into blocks and the onboard CPU monitors how often each block is read. The top 4/8gb read blocks are written into the SSD portion. This means it is OS independent. It is also much more efficient than a dual drive setup because you dont have to manually decide which files get the SSD and waste a bunch of that space on OS files that arent used often.

My boot time was cut by 75% once I installed the 500gb/4gb version on my laptop and photoshop launching by about half.

The problem is that benchmarks are not designed to properly highlight this drives strength. If you read or write a file you have not used before it is only a hair better than a regular 7200.4 drive. The incredible performance boost only comes from reading part of the drives a few times.

Edit: Here is a video of the 4gb version (the 8gb should be much faster) http://bcove.me/pi494k9t

 

Have you ever saw what we wrote? I was telling that it is useful to have SATAIII for this cache, another guy wrote smth close to this while you... You decided to write a review of How it works thinking that we don't know this at all.
Like we argue about this.

Good that at least Micleearth will find smth new.

 

I was replying to MichaelEarth. Most of what you wrote was not directly related to the OP's question.

Either way I am the only person to post about personal experience with the drive so NO U