Seagate Momentus hybrid drive in S15?

I'm thinking of ordering one of the new S series with basic specs and upgrading it myself. Would it be possible/advisable to put a Seagate 750gb 7200 hybrid drive in there, or is there some reason why that drive wouldn't play well with the S15?

Basically I like the idea of extra speed, but I need more space (and to spend less money) than getting a real SSD would allow. I also despise Win 8, which comes preinstalled on these new models. It would seem that the Seagate would solve all my problems.

(I apologize if this has been discussed before. I searched but I couldn't find anything.)

 

Well, after the Windows boot files and the applications you run often end up in the drive's cache, you would benefit from almost SSD-like loading times for those, but the cache is 8 GB so depending on your needs and expectations, it might be or might not be enough.

Another option would be to get an optical bay adapter and use both the HDD and an SSD (if you don't need the optical drive). In that case, you can also use the Intel Rapid Start which takes the space equal to your RAM size from the SSD to use it for a rapid hibernate file (where then you have the hibernate functionality behaving like the standard Sleep option - almost instant shutdown and recovery times and no battery loss).

Ideally, Sony would have added an mSATA slot so you could fit an mSATA drive in addition to the HDD and the optical drive, but still..

 

i have done the same with my S15, and i didn't get much improvement, i advise you to get a real SSD and put an optical bay us "ijozic" did told you.
and don't forget about the noise that hybride drive will do, it was really noisy, i have returned it after a week and get an intel ssd.

 

Thanks for the replies. Unfortunately, I do want to keep my optical drive, so a hybrid is the only SSD option for me at the moment.

 

ok, so wait for the new western digital hybride drive, it will be lunched soon and they promised better performance than the seagate one.

 

I believe the WD drives will use MLC, whereas the Seagate uses SLC, which is supposed to be more reliable. With such a small SSD cache, though, would the reliability difference really matter?

 

Oh, I forgot about those WD hybrid drives.. Hopefully, they will be out soon as I might need something like that, but was a bit underwhelmed with what I've read about the Seagate Momentus XT.

 

It will still be JUST a hybrid drive and will never even compare to an SSD.

 

Yes, but I need a dual boot OS and don't want to pay a fortune for a 480 GB SSD so I can have at least 200 GBs per OS. Running two hybrid drives in RAID 0 seems like the ideal combination for my purposes, at least till the next big SSD price drop.

 

compared to a fast 7200rpm drive (which is considerably faster than what Sony builds into the S15), the difference to a hybrid drive is negligible.