Your Thoughts on Hybrid-SS/Optical Drives

[heroofhyrule]

I am not planning on purchasing a hybrid drive (solid state and optical), but I have heard much discussion about this topic throughout these threads. I also have a few questions regarding them.

First, are they worth it? The price is nearly $134 more than an optical drive for only ~4GB of SS storage and the same amount of optical HD space.

Second, what's the overall concept? I get that one should load their OS/System on the SS part of the drive for fast booting, but is that it? Why would having your OS boot up in under ten seconds be any more effective than having it boot up in 20 or 30 seconds?

Third, how secure are Hybrid SS/Optical drives? Is the SS part more secure than the optical part?

So, my overarching question is this: shouldn't we wait until the price of SSDs comes down before we start using them? Are hybrid-SS/Optical drives simply a way to give consumers bragging rights about having a SSD? Is it just a marketing ploy and a way to make more money?

 

[pparks1]

It gives you quite a few of the benefits of having an SSD, but also providing more storage space. A coworker of mine put one into one of his machines recently. He said, "it doesn't perform as good as my 80GB X-25M G2 SSD, but it's far better than the mechanical drive that it was replacing".

Looking at NewEgg today, a 320GB hybrid drive is running $99. That's reasonable. A 320GB hard drive at NewEgg is like $45...so it's 2x the price. They are great for laptops where you want more speed from the drive, but since you usually only have 1 hard drive bay...you need a single drive for storage.

You don't see the SSD portion and the standard portion separate. The drive determines what gets read the most and places those bits into the SSD part so that you get the fastest reads possible and the stuff you access most often. It performs all writes directly to the mechanical portion.