Is a hybrid harddrive worth it?

Hey there

Just read this, thought someone might find it useful.
A test of samsungs 160gb hybrid drive, and if it makes a difference in performance and battery life.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/07/13/should_you_care_about_hybrid_hard_drives/index.html

The article is an interesting read.

Here is at little from the the conclusion of the article.

"Our title asks the question of whether or not you should care about hybrid hard drives today. At this point I have to say "don't bother." Although H-HDDs are still at the very beginning of their development and future versions with faster or more NV cache are likely to make a more substantial difference, our test results are straightforward on this early model. The performance benefits of the first H-HDDs using Windows Vista are small to nonexistent, and the battery life improvement could not convince us either."

Sidenote:
I just bought a 160gb seagate momentus 7200.2 and put in my 6615WD, its real performer, and makes much less noise than the 100gb drive zepto used when i got my laptop.
Sidenote to the sidenote:
You dont void your laptop warrenty if you change your hard drive.

Cheers

 

Nice article find!

Although I do not own a Zepto, I do own and Asus and I do know that changing the hard drive on an Asus will NOT void the warranty (same thing with the HD).

This is with saying that I have no idea about Zepto, I just wanted to post something else other than "nice post man!!"

 

No you will not void the warrenty from Zepto. Installing is easy and painless too.

 

Niels, the ZeptoAU rep, posted this on the Whirlpool forums:
I posted a comparison between Robson, Hybrid and 5400 normal drives about 20 pages back.
That may help as a starting point, though unfortunately it doesn't cover the 7200

Robson 1GB + 160GB HDD 5400

Søgetid: 20ms random access

Søgetid: 15ms full stroke access

Transfer rate: 32MB/S

Power consumption Theoretical values max: 3,2W

Power consumption Theoretical values min: 1,2W

160GB HDD 5400

Søgetid: 30ms random access

Søgetid: 25ms full stroke access

Transfer rate: 34MB/S

Power consumption Theoretical values max: 2,2W

Power consumption Theoretical values min: 0,6W

Samsung 160GB Hybrid 256MB

Søgetid: 18ms random access

Søgetid: 16ms full stroke access

Transfer rate: 35MB/S

Power consumption Theoretical values max: 2,1W

Power consumption Theoretical values max: 0,6W

 

Those are very strange numbers. I wonder how they got them. The transfer rate for the 5400rpm drive and the 5400rpm drive should be the same because flash does not speed up transfer speeds (and robson does not too). The transfer speed of flash is slower then the hard disk.

flash has an access time of 0-2ms. So how do you calculate flash and hard disk random access together? flash, flash, hard disk, hard disk, hard disk access? that would mean 0 + 0 + 20 + 20 +20 = 60 and then divide by the number of accesses? so 60/5 = 12ms random access? The measurements make no sense to me.

Sounds like a bunch of marketing BS to me.

 

Won't the flash drive speed up access times on average?

 

Yes and no. Flash has slow transfer and fast access. Flash has an access time of almost 0. But it wont change the access time of hard disk at all. And the random access should not change too I mean it is 256MB flash.

256MB/160,000MB (160GB) *100 = 0.16% So 0.16% of the hard disk can be accessed at 0ms and the rest at 20ms (20 is a too high a number anyway all the numbers in the list seem off).... wont change the average access time. It can change the random access time if by accident some of the random measurements are taken from the flash and not the hard disk.