SSD, Hybrid HDD, or both ?

Alespiller

Honorable
Dec 30, 2012
3
0
10,510
After using laptops for many years I had a simple buying strategy, buy a model 12 to 18 months old and double the installed ram before switching it on. This gave me a newish tech laptop at 2/3 of the price of the latest models and always resulted in a laptop which was fine for work. Now I have taken early retirement I am speccing my own and I have 1 problem that I just cannot make up my mind on so any suggestion are very welcome.

For storage I have 3 options.

1. Fit a 120 Gb SSD for the OS.
2. Fit a 120 Gb SSD for the OS and a Seagate Momentus 750GB hybrid with 8Gb SSD.
3. Fit only the Seagate Momentus 750 Gb hybrid

Money is not so important here as the hybrid drive is only £25 more than the normal HDD though I can save £84 by not using the 120 Gb SSD and only having the 8Gb SSD in the hybrid. If the hybrid drive had a 60Gb SSD or even 30Gb then I would probably just go with that but life is just not that simple. What I do not want to do is waste money by having 2 x SSD's if there is little performance improvement.
 

Alespiller

Honorable
Dec 30, 2012
3
0
10,510
I decided to go with the Seagate Momentus hybrid on it's own, the other parts are quite fast i7-3840QM and GTX 670M graphics which s a bit of overkill really for the kinds of games I might play. The main factor is I will only have it for a year then I am giving it to my sister so I want an uncomplicated machine with what appears to be an ordinary HDD like she is used to. It is bad enough that she will be getting dual boot Win7/Linux (I do most of my work in Linux), I do not want her to have to cope with ensuring an SSD with 2 OS's keeps enough memory available. The desktop I built to complete the system I will keep as straight Win7 and on it's Samsung 840 I have the OS and Microsoft Office. It's main purpose is home media, with occasional light gaming and the ability to do database work in Office. I am not yet sure whether I will put XBMC on the ssd or HDD but I suspect it will be the HDD.