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Hybrid Drives?

Well give it another year or two and you'll only be able to buy them soldered and glued to the motherboard and it will all become moot.

Lovely.
 
Incidentally the devices that have gone wrong were in three different devices, the only link being they were all macs.

I am confident apples own SSDs must be different in as much as its soldered etc. You have to install software for instance to enable trim support on non mac ssds.

Marks information is very interesting, and something I will bare in mind for the future. For now I will see how this hybrid one fairs, which I guess to an extent is what apple markets as its fusion drive.

What a faff! getting into my imac is not the end of the world, it has the glass front you remove, then screws to get to the back of the thing, but its all time. The companies wonderful dell end filled in today so not the end of the world.
 
I bought a 240GB OCZ Vertex 3 SSD the other day for my Mac Pro Desktop. I found a new one on fleaBay for £120.

I went into the Apple store in London's Regent Street to ask about an expander bracket. The guy I talked to said they didn't sell any and he recommended an Icy Dock MB882SP-1S-2B 2.5 inch to 3.5 inch SATA HDD/SSD Converter.

I got one from Amazon for £11.48, fitted the drive in and took the dock around to my mate Simon's. He installed Mac OSX Snow Leopard for me and gave me a copy of Lion.

I took the dock back home, put it inside my desktop and ... bloody hell it booted up a lot quicker and was faster to use.

I was surprised just how easy it is to upgrade a 2006 Mac Pro Desktop with a SSD.

Jack
 
As SSD's have heardly any heft to them I don't tend to bother with the brackets. Especially in desktops.

Two screws in the side or some adhesive backed velcro/tape work wonders.

They dont tend to stay in there for years and years.
 
I've experience with a Seagate Laptop SSHD (the post-momentus one). my Son's MBP C2D. Previously had a WD Blue 500GB in it. The link cable to the motherboard had gone, though I didn't understand that until I'd bought the new drive.

Anyway, installed the new cable and drive, and restored the machine from the WD500 drive using disk utility. Super.

Impressions? For general use, web browsing etc this C2D (2.5GHz?) with 8GB RAM is nearly as snappy now, with the hybrid drive, as my 2011 MBP i5 2.4GHz with 16GB and a factory seagate 500GB conventional HDD. I'm very impressed. It uses less power (longer batty life), is slimmer and runs cooler. And it was inexpensive!
 
Just did some HDTune benches on my two 1TB drives.

The new Seagate scored - (I don't think the SSD part registers in the benchmark)

Max Data 197MBps
AVG Data 161MBps
Burst 115MBps

The three year old Hitachi 1TB scored

Max Data 89MBps
AVG Data 87MBps
Burst 52MBps

Shows what a few years can bring. Plus the SSHD in its 1TB form is a single platter design which I much prefer. Hence the better performance from better data density. I always take a single platter version if I can for those reasons. The old Hitachi is a multi platter design.

In day to day use I always shortstroke my mechanical drives to keep the data on the fast part.
 
As a sidenote, I just tested a 2 year old 2.5" 500GB 7200rpm Seagate HDD (probably the non Momentus SSHD version) and it scored -

Max Data 103MBps
AVG Data 81MBps
Burst 120MBps

This drive will probably end up in a two year old laptop I have been given and currently modding/renovating. Dual core to Quad core, putting in a 1600x900 screen etc.
 
Have been looking at kit in a smallish box format and see that storage is available as mSATA and SSD. I know that one is mounted on the motherboard, I expect for reasons of size and such but do mSATA and SSD offer much the same performance?
 
auric said:
Have been looking at kit in a smallish box format and see that storage is available as mSATA and SSD. I know that one is mounted on the motherboard, I expect for reasons of size and such but do mSATA and SSD offer much the same performance?
Click to expand...

They should do, but often lower capacity mSATA/SSD are slower due to less data pathways. IIRC more chips = more pathways for the data.

I have a 8GB mSATA in a linux netbook but I have USB sticks that feel faster.

However, depending on what you want it for often the near instant access times make up for less than staggering raw MBps performance.

I tend to feel for general use with SSDs once you get above 150MBps it's a game of diminishing returns on the actual real life improvement from even faster speeds.
 
Well fwiw I have had my drive in for a few weeks now, I actually ordered a 2TB model without realizing.

Its exactly as I would anticipate, significantly faster than a standard drive but not as quick as a SSD.

Its very quiet actually, wouldn't know it was in there.

The only real downsides are, in an imac apple had a sensor connector which is not compatible, which is fixable with a small software utility which judges temp by the SMART status, the other issue is it does run a little bit warmer over all so I have heard the fan at a low level, which anyone who owns an iMac/mini would know is unusual to hear anything.

But over all for the price of 80 odd quid I am pretty happy.
 
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