hydrib drives in an iMac?

[selfinfliction]

anyone running a hybrid drive, and if so, is it worth doing a swap from a standard hard disk? I seen the price on them has come down substantially and I'm looking for the easiest way to speed up the system a bit without messing with a full ssd and regular disk both.

 

[talmy]

In recent iMacs you would have a problem with the temperature sensors.

I've got a hybrid (Seagate 500GB) in my MacBook and it is a mixed bag. The speed up in rotational speed was noticeable (but there would be none for an iMac). But my working set of programs is larger than the SSD cache so I only see a speed up with repetitive tasks such as program development with repeated recompilations.

Boot times are no faster unless I do repetitive reboots, for the same reason. At least in my iMac, I never boot it up (I use sleep when not in use) so boot time doesn't matter. Also now, with Lion, I've gone to leaving apps running all the time so app start times don't matter.

For all these reasons I find a hybrid drive in at least my iMac to be zero to perhaps negative value (because of the temp sensor issue), and unless Seagate or someone comes out with a hybrid drive with a cache at least twice as big it's a marginal value on my MacBook.

 

[derbothaus]

Hybrids are placebo. No value in adding small flash memory to a slow model as they usually do. Also you have no involvement of what the drive caches.

 

[88 King]

I have the Seagate 500GB hydride drive installed in the imac for couple of weeks now, and I do notice both faster boot time and app start time compared to the stock 1TB hard drive running Lion.

After few reboots and app launches, I'd say its about 1/3 faster than the stock hard drive and 1/2 slower than the Crucial C300 SSD I had before. The most noticeable difference compared to the stock hd I found is working with virtual OS. Another pleasant surprise is this hd is completely silent even under heavy load.

The disadvantage of the hd is the cache is emptied every time you boot into Bootcamp, so if you do a lots of switching between OSX and Bootcamp, then this hd might not be a good choice.

Also on the 2011 imac, you'll need to buy a 3rd party hd fan controller with this hd.

 

[selfinfliction]

thanks for the info. i never used bootcamp, i'm a vmware fan and rarely even have a use for it except when doing some of my online classes, they require internet explorer for some things.

I'm probably just going to pass on it though cause the system stays running most of the time and in all honesty, it works great for everyday use... i''m just now starting to understand that mac's run for a really long time without needing any upgrades... my old pc's required something every few months.

drank the mac kool-aid and not only am i happy, it's actually impressive how well these things run even after being nearly 2 years old.