New hybrid drives for laptops question.

[donfm]

Seems there is now something called a hybrid hard drive for laptops that consists of a hard drive paired with some SSD memory. This hardware is new to me. My question is do these new laptops have a hard drive connection in addition to a separate SSD drive connection or is this all one single drive unit that plugs into the hard drive connector? Thanks for your help.

[corkyg]

What you are heAring about are the Seagate Momentus XT series. The are 2.5-in formfactor drives, 9.5mm thick, and come in several sizes. The can replace regular HDDs in most laptops. Some of the newest, however, will only take 7mm thick drives - that is what many of the top SSDs are.

There is an enormous amount of traffic in the Anandtech forum that you can access so we don't have to reinvent the wheel.

I have used 6 of these hybrids with great success.

[donfm]

Originally Posted by corkyg

What you are heAring about are the Seagate Momentus XT series. The are 2.5-in formfactor drives, 9.5mm thick, and come in several sizes. The can replace regular HDDs in most laptops. Some of the newest, however, will only take 7mm thick drives - that is what many of the top SSDs are.

There is an enormous amount of traffic in the Anandtech forum that you can access so we don't have to reinvent the wheel.

I have used 6 of these hybrids with great success.

Thanks for the response. So from your answer I'm guessing there is still only one hard drive connection and these are not separate hard drive and SSD drive sockets as I asked.

I assume by your "wheel" comment you were sarcastically inferring I should have researched this before I asked my question. Well from reading all the rest of the posts here it appears nobody is using the search function. But now I feel very special. Thank you.

[T_Yamamoto]

Originally Posted by donfm

Thanks for the response. So from your answer I'm guessing there is still only one hard drive connection and these are not separate hard drive and SSD drive sockets as I asked.

I assume by your "wheel" comment you were sarcastically inferring I should have researched this before I asked my question. Well from reading all the rest of the posts here it appears nobody is using the search function. But now I feel very special. Thank you.

They are in one package with one connection. The SSD is used for cache.

[corkyg]

Current laptop HDD and SSD connections are SATA. Laptops often use a cage or caddy in which to mount the drive, whether HDD or SSD. Both have the same SATA connectors.

Sorry, I was not trying to be sarcastic about reinventing the wheel. I have written at least 6 messages on hybrid HDDs. Just do a search for Momentus XT in the Memory and Storage Forum.

http://forums.anandtech.com/search.php?searchid=740926

[sciencewhiz]

You'll need to do research on particular laptop models. Some models use a normal SATA hard drive, and soldered on SSD (Like Asus XU32VD). Other models use a normal SATA hard drive and a mSATA SSD (like the Lenovo x230). Others use the Seagate Momentus XT which have both the hard drive and SSD cache in the same SATA drive.

[Blain]

Unless you must have the additional capacity, I'd simply upgrade to a SSD for a laptop.
The Seagate hybrid Momentus XT drives (250GB, 500GB and the slightly better 750GB), aren't night and day different than other 7200rpm 2.5" spinning platter drives.

[tnt118]

My laptop offers the mSSD combination, something I hadn't heard of before I got it. However I decided I'd rather just replace the regular drive with a 240gb SSD and not mess with it.