Seagate Hybrid Drive

I installed a Seagate 500GB Hybrid drive a couple of weeks ago in my 8150. The standard 500GB HD my machine came with was only used for a couple hours before I did the swap so I can't really say I notice a change. Sometimes my machine boots up fairly quickly and sometimes it takes more time. Is there any way to check to see how and if the SSD portion is working or works? Thanks in advance.

 

No. The best you can do is just measure boot times w/ something like Boot Timer. The more and more you read from the Momentus XT (like boot over and over again), the more ends up in the 4GB SSD. Assuming the boot start up sequence makes it into the 4GB cache, boot times would be just a tad slower than if you had an SSD.

And if you had data or apps that are read over and over again (ending up in the SSD portin), reads of those files would be faster as well as the data is being read from the SSD.

So the only real way to know it is caching something is that the read times would be faster.

 

It works by docking the tiny information portions, like the 1-2mb files, into the 4GB portion so it can quickly access the larger portions, which every drive works better dealing with larger numbers.

So it will run better the second time you do something. Supposedly they're something else.

 

There's no way to see what's installed on the SSD portion, but if you close and open some programs a few times, they'll eventually get cached and start speeding up each time you open them. The more you shutdown and restart the machine, the faster boot should get as well.

 

You should have bought the 750g/8gb SSD version. They seem to work much better. Obviously due to the 2x more SSD.

 

Even the 500GB should yield good results. Check the chart halfway down the page:
AnandTech - Seagate's Momentus XT Reviewed, Finally a Good Hybrid HDD

The high price of the 750GB version makes me cringe, as a 64GB SSD + 500GB/750GB HDD set-up will cost the same or slightly more (assuming no internal DVD is needed).

 

750 looks awesome! Ill get it when it gets down to $149!

 

I have a question, when SSDs reach above 80% capacity they lose performance. Does anyone know if this is the case with these Hybrid drives?

 

Remember the SSD has a performance problem w/ WRITE operations due to "write amplification."

Since the SSD within a hybrid serves as a Read-Only cache, it's hard saying how the [FW] handles wear leveling and invalidating portions of the cache. So, any write performance issue would occur when caching new reads from the drive - which may be done asynchronously and never noticed. That coupled with the fact the SSD portion is SLC based flash (along with a good GC routine), it may never be a problem.

 

jclausius,

In your signature, you list a hybrid as your data disk. Do you notice a difference in speed over, say, a 7200rpm?

 

I would think, but cannot verify as I've had these drives since I've owned this laptop.

In my line of work, I have a lot of software libraries / web images that are needed to build other software. They've been read so many times, I'm pretty sure they're in the SSD cache, so my compilation times (even from raw source) are pretty fast.