Vaio F12 Dual Disk

Hello guys,
in this post
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/vaio-vpcf12m-upgrade-with-solid-state-hdd.776578/
I've been asking suggestions for a SSD for my Sony Vaio F12. I did buy the SSD but now I need another Sata HDD.

Which one would you suggest among those brands?

Seagate Laptop HDD
http://www.seagate.com/products/laptop-mobile-storage/laptop-internal-drives/laptop-hdd/

Western Digital Black
http://store.westerndigital.com/sto...tegoryID.13095000/Internal_Hard_Drives/Mobile

HGST
https://www.hgst.com/hard-drives/mobile-drives

Is there any other brand/model you would suggest?

Talking about storage capacity: would you suggest 500GB or 1TB?
Is 1TB supported on the Vaio F12 series? Did anybody try it?

What about the tickness? 7mm is ok? 9,5mm is too much?

What do you think about SSHD? It's better for performance. E.g.:

- Western Digital Black2
http://store.westerndigital.com/sto...6200/WD1001X06XDTL/WD_Black²/Internal_Storage

- Seagate SSHD
http://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/solid-state-hybrid/laptop-solid-state-hybrid-drive/

Has anybody tried the dual drive configuration? How do they perform? Is there too much heating? Is it too much work for the motherboard for the required working power?
Can you confirm the optical drive connector is only a SATA I type?

Thanks for your attention.
Waiting your replies.

 

Hi there.

Since I'm a Western Digital representative I will comment only on the WD drives.

The best choice when you add a second drive depends pretty much on what are you planning to use it for. For instance, are you going to run apps from there as well, or you just want some additional storage capacity?

If you're after the first option, you can take a look at WD Blue which is most commonly used for regular computing, light gaming and workloads and combined with SSD. It is fully capable to run most games as well as many programs for editing or programming, but it comes in limited capacity up to 1TB.

http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=N7KHGF

The Black drive that you've mentioned will be a very good choice too since it is a performance oriented HDD with a built-in dual-core CPU that makes the drive great for multitasking and will give you faster loading times as well. It is designed for heavy gaming, big workloads and intensive file usage, and has a 5-year limited warranty as well.

http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=mdxKFX

On the other hand if you just want some additional space for movies, music, pics, etc. you can take a look at WD Green since it is designed for backups and secondary storage. Its features allow it to be a great choice for quiet backup builds or for archiving, and works cool, quiet and saves a lot of power by spinning down after a certain amount of time (e.g. once every 15 minutes). Here's a link if you want to check it out:

http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=rH4T9v

About the capacity, in my opinion it's better to have few GB aside just in case than not to have enough space when you need it. Furthermore your laptop can support 1TB HDD as long as it's a 9.5mm thick 2.5" replacement hard drive, so I would go with the bigger drive.

As for the Black Dual drive, it is not a hybrid one but a single unit with 2 separate volumes - one 120GB SSD and a 1TB HDD. It uses different architecture than the typical SSHD because the hybrid drives blend HDD capacity with SSD speeds by placing traditional rotating platters and a small amount of high-speed flash memory on a single drive. Basically a hybrid drive only has a certain amount of fast storage (cache) for commonly accessed files, which means that the files within this cache are accessed at SSD speeds while the rest are accessed at standard HDD speeds. The con with this option is that with the hybrid drives you have no control over what the SSHD stores in its cache - the drive uses a built-in algorithm to determine which frequently used files it will cache and like I said, everything that is not in the cache will run at a HDD speed while with the Dual drive you can select where to store data or install your apps (SSD or HDD portion). I have such drive in one of my laptops and I'm satisfied with the performance it provides.

Hope this helps and feel free to ask any questions you may have!

Cheers!

 

If you have the moolah, a 2.5" SSD is a much better choice.

 

Hi Miro,
thanks for your great reply.

The drive I'm going to buy will be my primary drive, so I would like to focus on performance. This means I would not go for the Green in this case. But I will keep in mind what you've said about it for future implementations.

Unfortunately the WD Black series does not include a 1TB drive: I would go for a 500GB if I choose this type.
Anyway, I've had a look at the specs and the WD5000LPLX, which features a 32MB buffer size, is 7mm tick: do you think it could fit inside my Vaio? (The original Seagate Momentus on the Vaio is 9,5mm).
The WD5000BPKX is 9,5mm but has 16MB buffer: is there a big difference in performance between 16 and 32?

The Blue series is 5400 rpm (My Seagate Momentus is 7200), and I'm afraid I would have to sacrifice performance. The 1TB is 9,5, anyway.

The Black2 is a bit expensive for me, and I think the hdd part is a 5400 rpm too. Is this correct?
Anyway, thank you for the detailed explanation on how SSHD work and the difference with the black2 dual drive.
If I've understood correctly, with a common SSHD you have no control over which data will be stored on the SSD cache or on the HDD part, so you can't be sure the OS and application files will be on the SSD and will be served at high speed. Is this true? Even if they are the first thing you store on the drive, and the files you access the most?

Thanks for you professional support.
Cheers

 

Hi again.

You're always welcome and I'm glad I managed to help you.

Hard drive's cache is an important since larger cache will reduce access times, but once you get beyond a certain amount it doesn't really give you any better performance. In short, here it depends again on how the drive will be used. For mass storage drives, there isn't much of a benefit as most of their time is spent reading/writing large chunks of data. For the primary OS or a secondary drive for apps, you'll get more benefit from the larger cache.

As for the 7mm drive in the 9.5mm bay, you can put a drive in there as long as its not a bigger one since usually there is a caddy that holds the HDD.

And lastly about the hybrid's architecture - yes, the built-in algorithm will determine which files it will cache to the SSD portion, but it will not move the entire OS there - only the bits that are accessed and used most frequently, such as for booting.

Cheers!