And the price tag isn't particularly expensive either. About 140 dollars for a 500GB 2.5" drive. Uses about 4GB of super-fast flash memory, primarily for your OS, and the rest is spacehog storage space on the spinning drive itself.
Not as fast as a pure SSD solution, but definitely a huge step forward in terms of affordability and will likely see itself getting into laptops in the very near future.
That's just... Pure genius. I actually have an 64 gig SSD in my school comp, and I notice a lot of speed improvements. So yeah, this is a perfect stepping stone towards SSD.
Time/Date 05-21-10 12:23:57 PM
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Metal_Man88's Post
It's a nice idea, but I'll weather out my ancient rig a bit longer until the whole SSD thing becomes affordable. I have no clue how reliable a hybrid drive might be.
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I've heard plans for this, but in the smaller 512MB-1GB range, a few years ago. Nice to see that ~5 years later it finally happened. Honestly, I prefer the small SSD for OS and large hard disk for storage scheme, but I don't imagine that's profitable enough for manufacturers to bother with... so they invent some convoluted new technology to do a similar thing less effectively for cheaper.
Originally posted by Metal_Man88...I have no clue how reliable a hybrid drive might be.
Quite high. Perhaps better than a spinning right now, since your OS would be on an arguably better part of the drive for performance and reliability anyways. Reading up on it, it doesn't seem to be less reliable than an all-spinning drive as it is.
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Have they addressed the problem of frequent writes by the OS shortening the flash memory's life? Aren't the cells still limited to several hundred thousand writes before they stop retaining data?
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If I didn't already have 500GB in my laptop, I would get this. Engadget has a few links to other reviews also. If I had the money I would get one now, but no real need and I want to upgrade my DVD burner to a Blu ray drive first anyway.
