Question about HHDD (Hybrid Hard drives) and SSDs

[paulrawr]

Hi there, in my laptop I have a mSATA 16GB SSD which is used for cache, I'm thinking of replacing the main hard drive in it for a HHDD, but was wondering would the cache in the HHDD be able to work with the 16GB SSD if I made it into a cache as well?
(16GB can near enough only be used for cache, tried installing windows on it but gets full from all updates and won't fit SP1 on).

 

[Someone Somewhere]

Having two layers of caching probably won't do anything for you - you can do it, but I doubt you'll see any performance increase.

You could use the mSATA drive as a scratch drive, or get yourself a 120-128GB mSATA SSD (which will probably cost about as much as the SSHD) and install windows there - much faster than even a hybrid drive.

 

[paulrawr]

Having two layers of caching probably won't do anything for you - you can do it, but I doubt you'll see any performance increase.

You could use the mSATA drive as a scratch drive, or get yourself a 120-128GB mSATA SSD (which will probably cost about as much as the SSHD) and install windows there - much faster than even a hybrid drive.

Thanks for responding.

Well at the moment I've only got the mSATA drive and a 120GB hard drive (5400rpm) which I took from an old machine, and getting a 120gb mSATA would cost £30 more and wouldn't give enough space.

Sorry if this sounds a bit stupid, but is a scratch drive the same as a page file? I don't think I've heard that term before

 

[Someone Somewhere]

Scratch space is basically working area - say you're editing a video, you put the video on there and you can read and write to it faster.

OK, I was sort of assuming that your laptop came with a 500GB+ HDD which you'd be replacing with a similar sized SSHD. If you don't already have a decent sized HDD, you might as well get an SSHD.