SSHD (Hybrid Drive) vs HDD Boost vs SSD?

V15VA

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At the moment I have a run of the mill 7200rpm Seagate but I want a speed boost. I would love the speed of an SSD but since I want capacities of 1TB or more, it would cost me over £400!

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-Basic-Solid-State-Drive/dp/B00E391D00/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1388741113&sr=8-1&keywords=ssd+1tb

So I was looking at hybrid drives but have heard they don't give much of a speed boost. But they are quite cheap at 1TB costing £62.

Then I found a HDD Boost:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/SilverStone-SST-HDDBOOST-HDDBOOST/dp/B0033T7NI2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1388741349&sr=8-1&keywords=hddboost

you buy a hard drive and an SSD (a small one) and it uses the HDD for storage and the SSD as the cache. In total this would cost about £90 with a 1TB HDD the Boost and a 32 GB SSD.

What should I go for bearing in mind that my mother board only supports SATA 2?
 
Solution
Why don't you purchase an affordable small SSD and use it as your boot drive and use your existing HDD for storage? What do you need the 1TB for? Games? Media?

V15VA

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This sounds promising, I use my HDD mainly for games. If I were to do this how would I transfer my data to boot on the SSD but store on the HDD, also would folders like documents be stored on the SSD since that is where windows would be?
 

Poprin

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Well most SSD's have data migration software, either on disk or to download. You can use this to transfer all your files initially to the SSD. Then when you have windows booting from the SSD you can format your HDD and use it to store data. You can move your documents folders to a different drive no problem. My previous system had a setup with a 120gb SSD and a 500gb HDD. Windows on the SSD and any game / program I wanted to load fast or had high system requirements, then on the HDD I put all my data and installed all the older / indie games that didn't much benefit from the SSD.

Moving your data might be a fiddle depending on the size of the drives, I would recommend installing windows from scratch on the SSD because if you have windows 7 or 8 if you set SATA to AHCI in BIOS it will setup everything to work with SSD straight away.
 

V15VA

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But I understand that this software will just clone the dick onto the SSD right? So how do I get 500GB of data onto a 30GB SSD? Can you choose which files to migrate? but thanks for the speedy answer!
 

Poprin

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Well the catch is I would not recommend using less than a 120gb SSD as a boot drive really. 30gb would only be used generally as an HDD cache and I would only recommend that using a supported mobo chipset like z68 +

Like I say moving data would be a fiddle!
 

V15VA

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OK I don't mind getting a 120 GB SSD but, forgive me for asking, what does the chipset do in this whole process? My chipset is very old, its the P55 from 2010, does this effect performance, file transfer etc.?
 

Poprin

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It's just that some chipsets support SSD caching natively, so no need for things like that enclosure you spotted on Amazon. The only drawback of your older chipset is lack of SATA 3 support. However the performance difference with the SSD will be massive so I would not worry. My previous setup I mentioned used SATA 2 and it was pretty quick!
 

V15VA

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Thanks for all your help!