Hybrid Hard Drives

I would like people's thoughts about the HHD's being used in SZ's (and maybe other models).....good, bad, or the ugly. I have read there is a positive and negative side to these kind of hard drives...but I wonder in real world application(s) what users feel about them.

 

Good idea to create a thread for this. This would really help me understand H-HDD's better as well. It seems that most of the SZ's come with this technology.

I will input what I have come to understand. Hybrid HDD's behave like regular HDD's but since they are based more like flash drives they cache a lot of information. So I would expect to see faster boot times and relatively faster times in accessing files/folders/etc. My only concern is the life of these things. I think they will last as long as a regular HDD, and for sure in today's average lifespan of a technology product before it becomes obsolete or is time for a new one...(4-6 years)

 

I just ordered a SZ640 with the H-HDD and I've been wondering whether I made the right hard drive choice. Maybe the 7200 RPM drive would have been better? I've read a number of reviews and articles about hybrid drives, and I'm still not very clear about how a H-HDD compares with a standard 5400 RPM drive or a 7200 RPM drive.

One frequently quoted review at Tom's Hardware http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/07/13/should_you_care_about_hybrid_hard_drives/index.html isn't enthusiastic, although they do find a significant improvement in boot-up time: 24 seconds with the H-HDD compared to 33 seconds with a standard drive on an otherwise identical Acer notebook.

I've read in many places that Vista's ReadyDrive technology optimizes the H-HDD based on patterns of use. I haven't seen any information on how long it takes to establish a pattern of use or what types of use would make a difference. Given the unique way H-HDDs are optimized, do synthetic benchmark tests adequately capture the performance benefits of hard drives? Will a H-HDD perform better over time as ReadyDrive adapts to use patterns? The answer to the second question in theory should be yes. I've only seen one review that really addresses this question: http://www.mobiletechreview.com/notebooks/Sony-Vaio-SZ650.htm. This reviewer ran a hard disk performance test on day 1 and again on day 6. The score was 42% better after six days! That's a big improvement (assuming there aren't other variables at play).

I've also read that OEMs can pin data from selected applications to the non-volatile cache in the H-HDD. This should make those applications perform significantly better. Does anyone know whether Sony does this, and if so, for which applications? (And as a related question, would doing a clean install of Vista wipe out this pinning benefit, if there is any?)

 

I just came from a Sony Style store, testing out the SZ650 which has a 160GB H-HDD. Its a very noticeable difference in speed compared to a regular HDD. I opened up like 25 Explorer windows, 50 Internet Explorer windows, over 100 Command Prompts, and all of the bloatware applications on the desktop (Office 2007 trial, Norton, Spiderman Trailer, misc AOL apps) and there was not any lag. I expected a lag after a while since so many applications were open, but there was not, and it Vista was still consuming only 1.24GB RAM.

I then checked out to see boot times, and I didnt time it but it booted just a bit slower than my FZ right now....but thats comparing a SZ in the store with so much junk on it and my FZ which is very tweaked.

I was impressed.

 

any of you read this http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/c/5/9c5b2167-8017-4bae-9fde-d599bac8184a/perfaccel.doc

 

First the caching technology only works with Vista and is not always enabled by default. Its called nvcache and there is gpedit policy for it. Thus with XP/other OS the benefits are not clear.

But with the amount of bloatware on Sony any benefits of hybrid drives in Vista are quickly lost with boot/shutdown times in the 2-3 minutes timeframe with the default Vista install. Needless to say this is seriously unusable for anybody but the most committed technophobe but I'm sure even they must be cursing Vista because of this. So what Sony gives Sony takes away.

A clean install resolved that but I have noticed that shutdowns sometimes takes longer than the usual 15 seconds on my Vista install probably because the OS is doing some nvcache optimization. There are unfortunately no good benchmarks and comparisons on the hybrid drives but having used this for some time I don't feel the benefits if any are noticeable.