Seagate Desktop Hybrid Drives?

[VirtualLarry]

Thinking of having my friend pick up a few, two for his machines, and one for mine.

AFAIK (please, correct me if I'm wrong) the desktop hybrid drives are 7200RPM, unlike their laptop hybrid drives, so they don't suffer, performance-wise, compared to a regular drive.

The only thing that puts me off, is the relatively huge percentage of DOA reviews on Newegg for the 2TB model. Quite a few.

Anyways, they are on sale at Newegg right now, and you can get a 2TB model for $120, which isn't hugely more expensive than a 2TB 7200RPM HDD.

Also factor in the 3-year warranty (rather than 1 or 2), and the sale price seems reasonable. I wouldn't bite at the regular price of $160.

Does anyone have any experience with the desktop hybrid drives? Do they essentially speed up Windows bootup, and not much else? (That's what I'm expecting.)

My friend's machine, has a 64GB SSD for C-colon, and it's really, really, full right now. I figured I could clone it to the 2TB hybrid drive and give him some more room. I'm also building him another machine. I also plan on installing one of the 2TB hybrid drives in a pre-built I have, that came with a 500GB HDD, but I replaced it with a 120GB SSD, and I figured I could use more space too.

Crossing my fingers that we don't get DOA drives.

 

[corkyg]

Looks like it is worth pursuing. BTW, my laptop boot drive is a SSD, and the data drive is a Seagate Momentus XT (500GB) spins at 7200 RPM and outperformed the WD Scorpio Black it replaced.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I installed a 2TB SSHD into my G630 SB Gateway slimline rig, with 8GB RAM and Win7 HP 64-bit SP1, and a NV GT630.

First thing that I noticed, is that sometimes when I booted with the SSHD, my NV video card wouldn't initialize. Seems to be fixed now, but it was pretty weird.

Basically, SSHD is a gimmick. Only 8GB of flash means that cache hit rates are going to be low.

It boots Windows quickly, but for pretty much everything else, it's just a 7200RPM HDD.

A real SSD is so much more usable.