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Is the Time Finally Right For Hybrid Hard Drives?
a_hanso writes "Hard drives that combine a traditional spinning platter for mass storage and solid state flash memory for frequently accessed data have always been an interesting concept. They may be slower than SSDs, but not by much, and they are a lot cheaper gigabyte-for-gigabyte. CNET's Harry McCracken speculates on how soon such drives may become mainstream: 'So why would the new Momentus be more of a mainstream hit than its predecessor? Seagate says that it's 70 percent faster than its earlier hybrid drive and three times quicker than a garden-variety, non-hybrid disk. Its benchmarks for cold boots and application launches show the new drive to be just a few seconds slower than a SSD. Or, in some cases, a few seconds faster. In the end, hybrid drives are compromises, neither as cheap as ordinary drives — you can get a conventional 750GB Momentus for about $150 — nor as fast and energy-efficient as SSDs.'"
The only time I have really heard of them failing on any large scale is when they are plugged in and just don't work(or work intermittently) due to incompatibilities/software defects or when someone updates the firmware and generally if they work for the first week without problems they will run well. I own several and they have been solid although I have avoided spending large amounts of money and ended up with the smaller sizes that I used for system files.
With just the system files on SSD the difference in speed has been huge for both Linux and Windows.