What is on Your Mind?

I'm looking for a new internal hard drive for my desktop PC.

Having a look at some 'techie' sites I ran along some reviews of hybrid drives which supposedly combine the high capacity storage of magnetic drives with the fast performance of SSDs.

For example this 500 GB Seagate has 4 GB NAND memory and it's about 99 bucks on Amazon: Momentus XT | 7200 RPM | Seagate

So I'd like to ask if someone of you recommend such hybrid drives or if it's better to go for a standard magnetic HDD.

Thanks.

I'm familiar with SDD in a SAN environment. Not a laptop/PC.

If there are a lot of large "hot" files, specifically ones that are read all the time, then disk with an SDD buffer will improve read performance. One 15000 rpm SAS drive can post a max of ~200 iops. SDD can do 3000 iops. But this only works when the SDD already has the data you want to read.

If your apps write then immediately read the data SDD has just written, then SDD helps there as well. But then disks come with a large buffer cache anyway, SDD or not.

Bottom line: SDD helps when there is "smart use", i.e., maybe like MRU retention kinds of algorithms that databases use in shared memory. As a "dumb" buffer SDD helps, but I don't know the help it provides justifies the cost difference.

SAN software actively moves files into tier 1 (like SDD) based on observed historical demand. This REALLY helps performance.

Thanks. I think I'll go for a standard HDD.

Seems like hybrid drives do not provide many extra benefits than what standard HDDs offer for day-to-day tasks; and real SDDs are IMHO still too expensive.

Hybrid drives are about 100 USD more expensive than the SSD and HDD combined. With some custom programming you can build a hybrid yourself, consisting of a SSD of say 128 GB and a HDD of say 1 TB and the program decides where to put each file.
Later this year we will be seeing the release of the new Intel SSD generation, which puts price pressure on existing mainstream SSDs. In other words, hybrids are a truly temporary solution.

FWIW, the MacBook Air uses a SSD, and one of the benefits is that it boots very fast; and so after using a SSD for the past number of months, I've become a fan.