Hybrid Drives

Just about to order a new laptop and one option is a "Hybrid Drive" with a 500GB SATA disk with 8GB of Flash memory. At a guess the OS sits in Flash to allow rapid booting with Apps and Data on the standard HDD.

Does anyone have any experience of these?

Usually the drive learns over time what the most frequently accessed files are (or more accurately which blocks of data rather than files) and copies them to the flash memory, So the performance gain will improve over time from when you first use it until it has optimised itself.

So if you reboot frequently you'll likely end up with a lot of OS files stored in flash, whereas if you don't reboot often there will be a higher proportion of application related files in there.

Edited by deleted (Tue 09-Oct-12 21:29:46)

I got one last year, a seagate one, i had a load of problems with it, but then it is seagate after all and I normally avoid seagate.

When I got it working it was ok, not sure if it was that much faster than a normal drive. i now got it as a second drive with a SSd as the primary drive.

As been said above, the drive decides what files are used most and move them to the flash part, in theory.

In a laptop it is problem a good halfway house between capacity of a spinny unit and the speed of a SSD.

They work quite well but have a backup regime in place because if (or usually "when".. even if it is in 10 years) something goes wrong with it your chances of salvaging data are not as high as "normal" drives.

How so?

As I understand it the data is copied to the flash memory rather than moved, so theoretically block level recovery on the spinning disk should be just as successful.

Genuine question as I have not tried any data recovery from a hybrid.

In any case - a backup regime is imperative no matter what you use as primary storage.