SSHD vs HDD for desktop. And Win on partition or single drive?

[NeoK182]

Well pretty simple question. I like the concept of the SSHDs with their faster speed and i've been specifically looking at this one: Amazon.com: Seagate Laptop Thin 500 GB Solid State Hybrid Drive SATA 6Gb/s 64 MB Cache 2.5 Inch ST500LM000: Computers & Accessories

However after reading tons of reviews I've seen a lot of complaints that because of the only 8GB flash once thats not being used the drive is slower than a regular 7200 pm since it's 5400. and well that makes perfect sense.

So now I'm thinking that that's gonna end up not being the best solution for my machine. I'd love to get SSDs but just way to expensive. My plan was to buy two of those, one for windows and basic programs and a second for my games and photoshop, illustrator, indesign.

So first question is are these still good for desktop, or will I be better off with a standard HDD for the 7200 RPM.

And the second question is probably simpler. Is it better to have windows on it's own drive or is a partition fine? Looking at either buying two fast 500gbs or a single 1tb and then splitting it 400/600 for windows/games+programs.

Probably noobish questions but thanks to everyone in advance.

 

[kbrady1979]

You can get a good SSD for a few dollars more than one of those Hybrid drives. I would save up the money and get a 128GB SSD for Windows, and a 500GB-1TB for Data.

 

[Victor S]

And the second question is probably simpler. Is it better to have windows on it's own drive or is a partition fine? Looking at either buying two fast 500gbs or a single 1tb and then splitting it 400/600 for windows/games+programs.

If you image your system (Windows) along with your "core" programs, any partition for that that's sized bigger than what you need to hold it is either wasting space, or will make your system imaging slower than need be.
If you have a single drive, and it fails, you will lose everything that hasn't been backed up to an external drive or DVD/CD/Tape/Cloud.
So give some thought to that if it applies. One hard drive severely limits your backup/data protection options.

 

[jimbo45]

Hi there
@victor S.
Agreed absolutely about the fact it's not very sensible to backup to the SAME PC.

Backing up on to the SAME system is not a good idea -- external HDD's etc are cheap enough. You need to have a Bootable recovery program to at least be able to recover the OS.

I have a 120 GB SSD for my OS (and temporary data such as temporary internet files etc which I don't need to save).
My current OS is around 62GB. I use Acronis ATH 2013 - but any decent functionally equivalent program should do. The Backup image is (with standard compression) around 23 - 27 GB. This fits quite nicely on a USB 32 GB stick I have together with the bootable Acronis backup / recovery program.

Split your USB stick into TWO partitions with the DISKPART command --that way when creating the bootable media the program will only use ONE partition for creating and installing the program instead of formatting the entire stick. You can then use the 2nd partition to store the backup.

Alternatively backup to small portable external USB drives --they are cheap and small enough now and very reliable.

If you backup on to the SAME PC and the disk fails -- or for any reason stuff gets corrupted or you can't boot -- do I have to go on.

Cheers
jimbo