Drive: Seagate 1TB Solid State Hybrid Drive SATA 6Gbps 64MB Cache 2.5-Inch ST1000LM014
System: 2011 17" MacBook Pro
This is my work laptop and I was in need of more space than the factory 750GB drive could provide. I purchased the drive via Amazon for $119. I have prime, so the shipping was free. I chose the hybrid drive for two reasons ... first, it was only slightly more expensive than a non hybrid 1T laptop drive so, what the heck, why not try it and second, my boot times were stretching to nearly 3 minutes or so. I was not expecting SSD level performance ... much of my work involves manipulating big data sets, the size that would make any caching scheme irrelevant.
In prep for the install, I finally paid for a license for Carbon Copy Cloner. I did one final backup via Time Machine to my backup disk.
I installed the new hybrid drive into an external FW800 enclosure, and proceeded to clone my laptop drive to the new hybrid. After the cloning finished, I rebooted on the hybrid via the FW800 to check the copy and it booted just fine. I, then, swapped out the factory drive for the hybrid one.
Finally, I proceeded to do about a dozen boot/shutdown cycles to have the drive "learn" what needed to be cached to speed up the boot process. At this point, the boot times have dropped by 1/2 to around 1:25. I am also seeing improvements on the startup of Outlook 2011, but it is still quite the pig. (I had some initial issues with Outlook immediately quitting. It appears that the "helper" processes ... DB daemon, etc. had not yet finished starting up, but that seems to have stopped being an issue.) As reported elsewhere, after cloning, Microsoft Office 2011 required that the license key be re-entered. I think they are keying off of the disk identifier.One other side effect of cloning is that Spotlight had to reindex the entire drive.
Overall, the disk does what I was hoping it would do and speed up some of the time consuming things related to booting and certain applications. It is not going to help with general I/O speeds on my large data sets, but that will have to wait until big SSDs come down in price to something I can "afford" with my corporate spending limits. For only a slight price bump, it seems to be worth the extra $$$ ... at least to me.
UPDATE: 04/26/2013
As mentioned before, I do a lot of work with big data sets. After installing the drive and using it for a week. I have noticed that it does not "multi-task" as well as the original non-hybrid Toshiba drive. Specifically, I was re-doing my archive of data (composed of millions of ~1-4k XML files), the MacBook Pro becomes sluggish to a degree that I have not seen before. Lots of beach balls, delays in character echo, etc. When I am running one of my analysis tools on the "big data", the system exhibits the same behavior. So, now, I have to decide if the faster boot times and snappier app loading is worth performance hit on the ability to intelligently handle competing disk i/o loads.
System: 2011 17" MacBook Pro
This is my work laptop and I was in need of more space than the factory 750GB drive could provide. I purchased the drive via Amazon for $119. I have prime, so the shipping was free. I chose the hybrid drive for two reasons ... first, it was only slightly more expensive than a non hybrid 1T laptop drive so, what the heck, why not try it and second, my boot times were stretching to nearly 3 minutes or so. I was not expecting SSD level performance ... much of my work involves manipulating big data sets, the size that would make any caching scheme irrelevant.
In prep for the install, I finally paid for a license for Carbon Copy Cloner. I did one final backup via Time Machine to my backup disk.
I installed the new hybrid drive into an external FW800 enclosure, and proceeded to clone my laptop drive to the new hybrid. After the cloning finished, I rebooted on the hybrid via the FW800 to check the copy and it booted just fine. I, then, swapped out the factory drive for the hybrid one.
Finally, I proceeded to do about a dozen boot/shutdown cycles to have the drive "learn" what needed to be cached to speed up the boot process. At this point, the boot times have dropped by 1/2 to around 1:25. I am also seeing improvements on the startup of Outlook 2011, but it is still quite the pig. (I had some initial issues with Outlook immediately quitting. It appears that the "helper" processes ... DB daemon, etc. had not yet finished starting up, but that seems to have stopped being an issue.) As reported elsewhere, after cloning, Microsoft Office 2011 required that the license key be re-entered. I think they are keying off of the disk identifier.One other side effect of cloning is that Spotlight had to reindex the entire drive.
Overall, the disk does what I was hoping it would do and speed up some of the time consuming things related to booting and certain applications. It is not going to help with general I/O speeds on my large data sets, but that will have to wait until big SSDs come down in price to something I can "afford" with my corporate spending limits. For only a slight price bump, it seems to be worth the extra $$$ ... at least to me.
UPDATE: 04/26/2013
As mentioned before, I do a lot of work with big data sets. After installing the drive and using it for a week. I have noticed that it does not "multi-task" as well as the original non-hybrid Toshiba drive. Specifically, I was re-doing my archive of data (composed of millions of ~1-4k XML files), the MacBook Pro becomes sluggish to a degree that I have not seen before. Lots of beach balls, delays in character echo, etc. When I am running one of my analysis tools on the "big data", the system exhibits the same behavior. So, now, I have to decide if the faster boot times and snappier app loading is worth performance hit on the ability to intelligently handle competing disk i/o loads.
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