Would this hybrid HDD improve performance by much?

[Windows i7 920]

Newegg.com - Seagate Momentus XT ST95005620AS 500GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s with NCQ Solid State Hybrid Drive -Bare Drive

I'm considering putting that drive into my laptop. Specs of the laptop:

Intel Core i7 740 QM
8 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
Radeon HD 5650 1 GB
500 GB 7200 RPM HDD 16 MB Cache
Windows 8 Developer Preview

Would this improve performance by much as far as boot speed and hard disk intensive apps? Or would I be basically throwing money down the drain ?

 

[Corazon]

I'd totally go for it. *drools*

 

[kronckew]

just replaced my 250gb sata drive in my acer t650 desktop with one. boots about 50% faster. apps, like firefox, seem to load & run faster too.

originally ordered a 320gb version, but they were out of stock & i was told that seagates plant got flooded, so no more deliveries till around january. i had just seen the news over the weekend about the floods in thailand, & SE Asia, so i gather that's what they meant. my supplier actually had the 500gb in stock, so i had them send it instead. so far so good. if you decide to get one, be quick before stocks go.

interesting tests on seagate's site. seems drive is equivalent to a velociraptor drive & is much faster than a 10000rpm or 7200 rpm equivalent conventional hdd, but slower than a real ssd. seagate uses a 4gb 'adaptive memory' chip to form a read cache that learns from your useage. it also has a more std. but larger than normal 32mb r/w cache.

the system rating for my old hdd was 5.5, new hybrid is 5.9.

interesting video on it HERE

 

[badger906]

youll see read speads of about 270-300Mbps so about 2/3rds that of an SSD

They only come into their own after a few boot cycles once they have built up sufficient data on the SSD cache