hybrid drives - how does it work?

[suedehead]

i'm looking at the momentus seagate drive. but i don't really need model specifics, i'm more interested in how they make your boot times faster etc.
i take it it's because you put mac osx on the 4gb ssd partition? or not? is 4gb enough to put the osx on? if not, then explain please? in lamens terms.

also does anyone work with ableton & lion?

thank you.

 

[monsow]

Its 7200rpm vs 5400rpm... I have both hard drives in my 2 macs, and the 7200 is clearly faster and you can feel it, but it makes noise and the battery time is like 1 hour less on my 7200rpm drive :/

 

[Demosthenes X]

i'm looking at the momentus seagate drive. but i don't really need model specifics, i'm more interested in how they make your boot times faster etc.
i take it it's because you put mac osx on the 4gb ssd partition? or not? is 4gb enough to put the osx on? if not, then explain please? in lamens terms.

also does anyone work with ableton & lion?

thank you.

The drive comes with 4GB of flash memory, plus whatever capacity you chose in regular, spinning drive format. It also includes a pretty intelligent algorithm to determine what gets saved to the flash memory, and what gets saved to the regular hard disk.

It doesn't save the entire OS to the flash (that's closer to 13GB than 4GB), but it does save files that are regularly called upon to boot. Same with other programs - it knows which files are called on most, and stores them on the flash memory.

The end result is something not as fast as an SSD, but often faster than a conventional HDD. And the price point is great, especially for notebook users who need lots of storage, but appreciate the benefits of flash storage.

I thought about putting one in my MBP, but I bought a 128GB SSD instead because I didn't need 500GB of space, and the SSD wasn't a lot more expensive anyway.

 

[suedehead]

thank you both.
especially you Demosthenes, clear and to the point. SSD's with enough storage (my music folder alone is +-100GB) are still to expensive. i think 500gb is a minimum for me.
i understand the difference between 5400 & 7200 rpm, but i was just wondering how the hybrid works since it has only 4GB of SSD memory and i figured that would not be enough to store the entire osx on.

monsow, your hdd is it a hybrid? if not, can annyone else perhaps shine a light on the impact it has on battery life? thank you.

 

[teameurox]

I have a 500gb Momentus XT as well as my stock 250gb in the optibay now. All in all with both drives in my machine my battery life hasn't decreased dramatically what so ever. Not to the point that its caused an inconvenience, or even to the point of me noticing.

 

[GermanyChris]

thank you both.
especially you Demosthenes, clear and to the point. SSD's with enough storage (my music folder alone is +-100GB) are still to expensive. i think 500gb is a minimum for me.
i understand the difference between 5400 & 7200 rpm, but i was just wondering how the hybrid works since it has only 4GB of SSD memory and i figured that would not be enough to store the entire osx on.

monsow, your hdd is it a hybrid? if not, can annyone else perhaps shine a light on the impact it has on battery life? thank you.

I have a SSD and a HDD my 11.5GB itunes library is more than enough to get me through a 4hr a day commute...my recommendation is a smallish SSD and external storage for the rest. You'd be amazed at what you can trim, the Compaq that the Mac replaced had a 120 and the thinkpad the the Compaq replaced had an 80..I can honestly live on 64 with AAC formatted music 120 gives me 58GB free..

People will tell you that a hybrid is just as fast but it isn't, optibay is really the only cheap speed out there.