P1 Sony Vaio SZ7 - hard drive questions

I will most likely be buying a high-end Sony Vaio SZ7 Premium from Portable One in about a month, and I have a question regarding various hard drive options before I buy. Here are the choices I'm thinking about:

1. 250GB hard drive @ 5200 RPM
2. 200GB hard drive @ 7200 RPM
3. 160GB hard drive + 256MB flash hybrid

I know that the 7200 RPM hard drive will be considerably faster than the 5200 RPM one, but my main question is: how much battery life will be reduced with this upgrade? Battery life is very important to me, so 30 minutes would be important.

Also, the 160GB hybrid hard drive, while a good idea in theory, concerns me in terms of performance and reliability. My most important question here is how long will it take for the flash memory to wear out and my hard drive to crash? I'm used to traditional hard drives and I'm a little unsure about how long a flash cache will last, especially with how much Vista uses the hard drive. What if it does crash? Will only the cache be lost and the rest of the hard drive remain accessible?

My second question regarding the hybrid drive is how well do they perform in the real world? I've read various speculations and some benchmarks, and it seems that in most real cases it's not any faster than a plain 5200 RPM hard drive and doesn't help battery life much, if at all. Is this true?

Sorry if these questions are kind-of technical and difficult to answer . I'm not sure if this would be better asked in a general questions forum, but I thought here would be better because I think different hard drive makes have different power consumptions.

 

This should pretty much answer all your questions.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=59053&page=16

 

Thanks.

I didn't read the whole thread, but I've already seen the benchmarks posted on that page from Tom's hardware. The reason I asked here is because those benchmarks seem to show some 7200 RPM drives taking less power than some 5200 RPM drives, while the opposite is generally true. What I wondered is whether the specific 7200 RPM drives offered by P1 decrease the battery life significantly. However, by now I've decided to go with a 5200 RPM after reading some users of the SZ7 with 7200RPMs that got 30mins - 1hr less battery life than with a 5200RPM.

So now my only remaining question is regarding the reliability, speed, and battery consumption of the hybrid drive versus a standard one. This question is probably better suited to a non P1 forum though...

 

Here is data on the 7K200 Series 7200RPM HD upgrades and per HGST same power requirements as the 5400RPM HD's:

http://www.hitachigst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/A198FEF5A3B22F08862572D400656432/$file/7K200DS.pdf

As for Hyrbid drives here is the data sheet on them:

http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/ds_momentus_5400_psd.pdf

 

Thank you! That's exactly what I need to make the decision