Second Drive option. Hybrid or Non Hybrid with mSATA Card?

hargil

hargil

Silver Level Poster
I indend to get a SSD for my first drive (120 GB intel 520).

As far as a second disc goes would i be better getting a hybride drive (750 Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid)
or a normal drive (750 GB Scorpio, say) with a mSATA card?


I assume a hybrid and mSATA card is not a good idea!!

thanks
 
vanthus

vanthus

Member Resting in Peace
I would go for a normal hard drive for your second one,probably a caviar black would be the best choice.
 
hargil

hargil

Silver Level Poster
whould you go for the caviar black based on speed, longevity or for some other reason?

wouldn;t the mSATA amke it faster? or would there be no practical improvment?
 
A

andste659

Member
Hello, I'm looking to move from a desktop to a laptop and PCSpecialist seemed a good place to check - this thread is almost on the point I'm after - does anyone know how the Hybrid drives stack up against an SSD / normal HDD pair?

If I was mainly going to have operating system on the SSD and everything else on the normal HDD, I was wondering if it was a waste of the SSD (compared to a hybrid), with a 120GB SSD I suppose there should be room for a few games but I've yet to find an option on Steam to allow some to be saved on one drive and some on another (not that all games are on Steam). The difference in cost isn't crazy, but would cover moving to a matt screen or a blu-ray drive (or just having a lower cost).
 
hargil

hargil

Silver Level Poster
I don't do games but...

When you install a program (game) do you not get an option as to where to save it to?

if so could you not have a directory on the second drive (d:) called d:\programs and load most of the normal programs there and only load the ones you want to run fast on the c:\programs directory
 
A

andste659

Member
Yes for most programs - but Steam is a content delivery system, and might (I can't remember - it was meant to be a side comment not the main point) just whack everything into the same place.
 
Q

QuickstepKing

Active member
As far as I recall, Smurfette is right. The mSATA drive is joined with the main boot drive and Intel's hardware manages what gets 'cached' to the mSATA drive. So your boot drive and mSATA are merged as 'C:' on windows. You can't have a secondary drive using the mSATA cache and mSATA will probably only be a benefit if your primary drive is not hybrid.

A hybrid drive would work as a secondary drive as it's cache is onboard the drive. Therefore you could have a non-hybrid drive with mSATA as your Primary drive and a hybrid drive as your secondary drive.

Your suggestion of a primary SSD and secondary hybrid seems the best option performance-wise, or you could go for a non-hybrid secondary if you don't need the performance for the data stored on it.

Note that with hybrid drives and mSATA cache, the initial runs of applications and data are as slow as non-cached drives because the system hasn't cached it yet. It only does so once you have run them once or twice.
 
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