SSD Hybrid vs. HDD

[Bradfo69]

Disclaimer: I'm about as bad with laptops as I am with laser projectors.
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OK.... I did the deed and finally bought what I firmly believe will be the LAST "be all, end all" laser show laptop. I've gone through a number of them that I haven't liked or had some sort of problem but I ended up with a beast of a gaming machine, the Asus ROG G751 J. 17.3" touchscreen, i7 proc, currently 16 gig of RAM, 4 USB3.0 ports, VGA, HDMI and Thunderbolt ports, dual hard drive capability, yadda, yadda yadda. Is it overkill? Yeah, probably but, isn't that what we do?
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Anyway, I put a 500 gig SSD in as the main drive and W-O-W! Boot time went from 1:32 to 8 seconds. And it's not even m.2 SSD which is reportedly twice as fast as SATA. Anyway, for the second bay for storage, I picked up a Seagate 1TB Laptop Hybrid Drive but now, before I open it, I'm having second thoughts. I paid like $91 at Best Buy and I'm seeing it for closer to $70 other places so, I may return it anyway but, I'm also hearing the Western Digital Scorpio Black 500 gig drives are potentially faster and some people have expressed that the hybrid drives have been a problem. It's sort of a bastardized way of boosting performance of a standard 5400rpm drive. The 1TB versus 500 gig doesn't bother me too much since really, shows and music don't take THAT much room. Even the shows in wav files, while larger are going to take a long time to fill 500 gig.
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So... anybody have familiarity with either of these two? And if the Scorpio is a better choice?

[NobleGas]

I'm running a hybrid 750GB 3.5" disk on my desktop; it did improve boot times by about 25%, but it's not blindingly fast and I wouldn't pay extra for the hybrid over a normal HDD in the future.

[dkumpula]

I upgraded all my PCs including a laptop last year with SSDs as the boot drive and was thrilled with the performance improvements. Initial boot times and any app boot are very small fractions of what they used to be, which is the only delays I noticed previously. Even my slowest PC (a quad core AMD that's at least 5 years old) is more than adequate for simultaneous lasershows, lightshows, music and video streams, so I don't plan on doing upgrades to the proc for a while.

Assuming Beyond doesn't burn more processing power than LSX, I'd suspect you'd be good for at least another decade, Brad.

-David

[Bradfo69]

Agreed. I expect this to be the primary laser laptop for a long, long time. I'm just up in the air about the actual storage drive.

[JohnYayas]

BestBuy has price match. If you see it for $70 somewhere else just call the pricematch number and they will fix you up.

I have seen the 1TB SSD prices becoming very reasonable. I almost picked up a Samsung EVO 850 500GB for $149 at Office Depot tonight but am holding out for a 1TB SSD.

[kecked]

I did pick up the ego 850 500gb. Ssd. Love them

[Datsurb]

One thing i have learned over the all the years I have worked with computers. Prices are more or less the same, but the performance and capacities are getting better. The performance and capacity are more or less eaten by poor programming.

If I may give Dave a bit of advice: Go for ruggedness instead of capacity for 2. bay storage. As you say, you already have a 500GB SSD, and it will take som time to fill that. Slip in another SSD as a secondary drive and you get better performance. Both disk speed and your battery will last longer.

When times come and you need more diskspace, the SSD`s will be so cheap and/or large that you will have no trouble other than that you probably end up with a brand new PC.

Been there - done that.

Personally, i now only use second hand laptops for most purposes. Mainly because i get them for free, but also because they are more than suitable to serve Beyond and QS with the power needed to perform.

Espen

[Bradfo69]

Very true. I pretty much have used second hand laptops all along and while not always free, they're usually less than $150. I have a couple that were new but, one got damaged in Utila and Square Trade just gave me my money back. Then I got one to replace it and while it's "ok", I settled for less than what I really wanted. A second SSD being better for battery life is true as well although I rarely run on just battery.

[dnar]

Hybrid drives are great. I recently sold a large quantity of Dell Latitude business laptops with 1TB/8GB disk/flash. It takes a little while for the smaller frequently used files to rest in the flash and the results are great.

Personally both my Lenovos have SSD for boot. The 12" model boots from a 120G M2 drive,the 14" from a 250GB SSD and the 500GB 2.5 HDD is for movies and music. Boot times are insane.

[masterpj]

SSD"s are great and usually the more capacity you get the faster the performance.
I usually recommend the samsung EVO SSD's

Whatever you do.. do not get kingston SSD's even as cheap as you can find them on ebay.... they are unreliable and very slow... they are slower then most HDD's even.. however minus the kingstone ones SSD's are a clear winner.. the hybrid hard drives are ment for laptops mostly with only 1 drive bay.. 1 small SSD section for the OS and the HDD for mass storage... I would recommend to go with an full SSD if your laptop has 2 HDD drive bays *my laptop has this*.