SSD vs Hybrid SSD / HDD

[mdench]

Looking at buying a new HDD for my laptop and was looking at getting an SSD. Though always been slightly put off by the relatively small sizes 60 / 128gb compared to the 500gb currently in my laptop. Upon searching SSDs i came across this Seagate 750GB Momentus XT 2.5" Hybrid SSD/HDD.. | Ebuyer.com.

Now my questions are:

has any one had any good / bad experiences with these Hybrid style drives?

and are there any pros / cons over SSDs?

Cheers

[CyberNerd]

Fast for data you access regularly.
A good compromise if you need a lot of storage space on the device.

[Arthur]

If you rarely use the optical drive in your laptop you could go for option number two - an SSD for your OS and applications plus a regular 2.5" HDD for data where your DVD drive would normally go using an adapter such as this one.

How full is your 500GB HDD? Would a 256GB SSD still be too small?

[mdench]

er... 24gb left? tho i like the idea of the adapter!

[jamesfed]

I use a SSD in my work PC and one of the 500GB XTs in my home PC (extra space for games) and I must say that the Hybrid does do very well indeed - much faster than a normal HDD (although it takes some time for it to figure out what to cache) although a SSD does still have it beat hands down.

[localzuk]

I have both now in my desktop. The SSD absolutely whups the arse off the hybrid.

The hybrid will speed up some things, like OS loading (its only a couple of seconds slower loading Windows 7 compared to an SSD) or your most common applications but for data and random access it is just a hard disk.

[EduTech]

When I purchased a laptop about 7 months ago now I was also debating weather to get an SSD or stick with the factory 500GB SATA, I needed space because I like to run a few VMs but I also wanted the speed of an SSD.

I went with 120GB SSD in the end and I use an External Hard Disk for all my large files. I still have space to run VMs on my machine and use all of the apps I use on a regular basis and do not have any issues. At one point I had 3 Server 2008 R2 VMs (Lync & Exchange 2010) and I didn't really have an issue running at 70% - 80% Full at one point.

I only have a 13" machine so no optical drive and no expansion.

James.

[3s-gtech]

Got a couple of 17" Sony VAIOs here that have two bays, best of both. Definitely only got one slot?