How does a Hybrid Drive work exactly

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dirtydan17

dirtydan17

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May 24, 2014
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So right now my 500 GB HDD is pretty much just gonna be my mass storage drive for videos and such, and so i'm looking for a new hard drive and I was looking at SSD's but they were too pricey for the amount of storage I was looking for. Then I saw something called a hybrid drives and I did a bit of research on my own and found out they actually have an onboard SSD and I thought that was really good for the Price/Performance. Then I looked at the specifications and saw that the SSD actually was only 8 GB and I know for sure that is way to small to have an Operating System installed on there.

***So my main question is; How does a Hybrid drive supposed to "Boot" faster than the conventional HDD and why do hybrid drives only have an 8 GB SSD instead of at least a 32 GB to fit the OS on it?***
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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A hybrid drive is a regular HDD, with a small (as you have seen) SSD chip.

All it does is remember your most used files. Those end up on the SSD portion. You cannot address that space directly. It is all handled in the drive firmware.
It is seen by the OS as a single drive.
 
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dirtydan17

dirtydan17

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So pretty much what i've read so far is that sucking it up and getting an SSD as a boot drive is a much better choice than getting a hybrid drive.

 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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Yes, That is by far the best and fastest solution. The SSD does not have to be huge. 120GB or 240GB is fine for the OS and applications. Other things that really take up space live n the HDD.
 
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geofelt

geofelt

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120gb or 240gb is fine for a "C" drive. You can install a fair number of games and photos.
It is the video files that take up lots of room and should go on a hard drive if you have lots of them.

If you think 500gb would do the job, you can buy a 500gb Samsung evo for $220.
It is easy to add a hard drive later when you need more room.
 
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