Buying a Seagate SSHD for my laptop?

PedroCst said:

I have a doubt: is Samsung 840 120GB SSD a mid-end product?

Let me put it this way. If you look at consumer reviews of all SSDs on Newegg, the Samsung 840s is one of the few getting review scores of five out of five (the rest are getting four out of five, which isn't shabby). While the 840 Pro is superior (and more expensive) to the 840, that doesn't mean the 840 is not still a good SSD. For its price range, the 840 is easily as good as it gets. Unless you use the snot out of your laptop all day everyday (and maybe not even then), the 840 will do just fine as long as you make sure 25% of its capacity remains empty.

If cost and capacity are issues, the Seagate 500GB SSHD is still a good compromise between cost, capacity, reliability (it's been getting pretty decent reviews), and performance. As I already mentioned, even though I could (kindasorta)afford a 512GB 840 Pro, I just couldn't justify spending that much for a drive for a computer that cost considerably less than the drive. Even the 500GB 840 was too much of a stretch, especially since that notebook doesn't get used that much. That's why I decided on the SSHD. It won't be as fast as an SSD but it is already faster than the original HDD and should get better with more use and only cost me 1/7 of what the SSD would have cost. For me, it's a happy compromise but only you can decide what your needs will be.

whs said:

...There are also the questions whether your port runs on 3Gb/sec or 6Gb per second and whether your mobo supports AHCI. Both will have an impact on the SSD performance.

True but keep in mind, no matter what the speed the port runs on, the performance difference will still be better. The port the HDD in my notebook was on SATA II (3TGb/s) and the SSHD got the same improvement in program loading that I got on my desktop's SSD running on a SATA III port. Boot times, once the SSHD is "trained", will not be as dramatic as with an SSD on a SATA III port but still will be an improvement.

I've got an Intel X25-M SSD, which is SATA II, and I have the Samsung 830, which is SATA III and they run +/- 1% of each other on the Random 4K Read/Writes and Access times. If I put the Samsung on the SATA II port, it only hinders Seq Read/Write and Random 4k-64 thread numbers. The matters that matter are virtually identical.

That is true, I will give you that. I have had a few SSD's and the only one that went bad(two actually) were the ones with a Sandforce controller. Not just any Sandforce controller, but the SF controller Intel spent over a year tweaking for reliability. As recent as the Intel 520 drives, Sandforce still has issues. I've heard good things about the Kingston and the Adata SSD's which also have Sandforce controllers. The issue now is, SSD's without a SF controller are fast enough that there is NO advantage to having a Sandforce based SSD. To be honest, Sandforce based drives were ONLY faster in compressible data on sequential reads/writes. Something that is worthless to 99.9% of SSD users. There are too many SSD's that are better options that don't have a Sandforce controller.[/QUOTE]

If you can let me what are issues users are facing with Intel 520? In my test lab I use sandforce & non-sandforce based SSDs for real-world like data testing. I prefer this than just benchmarking, due to commercial catch in few benchamarking tools. I still back my previously said statements about sandforce based drives reliability

I've been looking at Hybrids for the past few days, I may need to replace the hhd in my laptop. The new Seagate thin laptop model is very appealing, 500gb plus nand for $70, or 1tb and nand for $120. It's not going to be as fast as my 840 pro but from reviews, it learns very fast what is needed in nand. I almost hope I can't recover my current laptop drive.

madcratebuilder said:

I've been looking at Hybrids for the past few days, I may need to replace the hhd in my laptop. The new Seagate thin laptop model is very appealing, 500gb plus nand for $70, or 1tb and nand for $120. It's not going to be as fast as my 840 pro but from reviews, it learns very fast what is needed in nand. I almost hope I can't recover my current laptop drive.

Go for the hybrid drive if 120GB/250GB SSD is not enough for you.
In case you want to recover some files, I recommend you to install a Linux distro, boot it from a flash drive and copy the files (the drive will be accessible this way).

PedroCst said:

madcratebuilder said:

I've been looking at Hybrids for the past few days, I may need to replace the hhd in my laptop. The new Seagate thin laptop model is very appealing, 500gb plus nand for $70, or 1tb and nand for $120. It's not going to be as fast as my 840 pro but from reviews, it learns very fast what is needed in nand. I almost hope I can't recover my current laptop drive.

Go for the hybrid drive if 120GB/250GB SSD is not enough for you.
In case you want to recover some files, I recommend you to install a Linux distro, boot it from a flash drive and copy the files (the drive will be accessible this way).

I've been running different iso'd on the laptop today, Linux Mint and the new Ubuntu. I really like Ubuntu, it runs well from cd so I exspect it to fly from the hhd.

The hhd in the laptop is still good, has some pending sectors. After I get the new drive in I well do a low level format and use this old hhd for playing with different Linux disto's. Nice thing about this old Dell is the hhd swaps out in one minute.

I just bought this off evil bay. Seagate Momentus XT ST95005620AS 500GB 7200RPM 2.5" Hybrid Hard Drive. $65 shipped, it's a refurb but I got the two year warranty for an extra $15. It has 8gb of nand and with a 7200 rpm spindle it show be fast enough for me and this old Dell 1525.