large capacity 2nd hard drive - standard or hybrid?

[monkeybagel]

I have a new W520 with an Intel 160GB SSD (OEM) and would like to have a storage drive for .vmdk files and ISOs. I was looking at either the 750GB Momentus XT drive, or a 1TB Western Digital Blue. I have a 500GB Momentus drive that I had in a MacBook Pro and was impressed with it. It is a nice compromise between storage and performance.

What I am unsure about is whether or not I will see much performance gain when this drive is not a boot drive. I will be running VMware Workstation VMs on it, and administering ESXi servers. I would like to keep a library of ISO files on here to upload to ESXi datastores as well. Since you can never have too much storage, the 1TB is attractive for $90 locally. The 750 Momentus is $180.

Quite the price difference and a 25% reduction in capacity. Is it worth it to get the Momentus? Performance is important, but I wonder if the caching algorithm will be accurate with such a diversity of data being accessed since it is a data drive.

Thanks.

[wolfman]

The Western Digital Blue is a 5400 RPM drive right (they also have a 1tb 5200 RPM)? If so, there is a compromise in between - a 750gb 7200 RPM like the Hitachi drive I keep in my T420 for VirtualBox VM's. It works great for that purpose. I would expect you won't see the same value in the hybrid if it's a data drive and not the boot drive. Western Digital makes a 7200 RPM 750gb drive as well, it's around $105 at www.newegg.com presently.

[jcvjcvjcvjcv]

2nd harddrive? You mean 1st harddrive, second storage device? Unless Intel introduced some 160GB mSata SSD that I haven't heard of..

Storing ISO's is going to make the small SSD on a hybrid drive useless. A hybrid drive is nice if it's the single drive in a system. If you already have an SSD; don't bother with it, save the money.

If you also want to keep the optical drive you might consider getting an mSata SSD and put the storage HDD in the main bay where your SSD is now. I just got an 256GB Crucial m4 in mSata in my W520 and it works great. The Hitachi 500GB is also still there.

[davidhbrown]

I had the Seagate Momentus 750GB Hybrid drive in the primary drive bay for a couple months while booting as usual from mSATA SSD. Using it for large file storage; virtual machine images, Outlook .pst archives, video files, less-frequently used applications, etc. It was slower for me than the Samsung drive I'd been using before and to which I've returned, putting the hybrid drive in out kid's notebook as its only drive where it should be able to function as designed.

Seems unlikely over a week later you haven't made up your mind yet, but I would go with a fast regular 7200RPM drive. I think the flash memory on the hybrid will just get in your way unless you're booting from it.

[JBuzzard]

I have sort of the same config in a W520 - MyDigital 128GB mSATA drive in the card slot and a Seagate Momentus XT 750GB in the hard drive bay. I keep both frequently accessed work files (mostly smaller Office and HTML files) and other infrequently accessed ones like iTunes library and downloads on the XT while the mSATA drive is purely for OS and applications. I've found the response time for the work files on the XT to be very fast - almost like using a SSD. I'm not sure it is worth the extra premium over a non-hybrid drive but the performance certainly isn't sluggish.

I'd also used it for awhile as my only drive partitioned with a 120GB boot partition and the rest for user files. In day-to-day use it was noticeably slower than aSSD (Was comparing it to a Samsung 830 128GB SSD) but still quite quick compared to the OEM Seagate Momentus HD that came with the W520.

BTW I also found that things sped up a bit on both drives when I turned off the Windows paging file. This machine has 32GB of RAM so the paging file was using up most of the free space on the mSATA drive so getting that back was a big plus and I've yet to hit any RAM limitations.

[monkeybagel]

I've run into the Pagefile thing as well. Out of 160GB, the large Pagefile and particularly the hibernation file eats into the precious SSD space.

I ended up going with the 1TB WD drive for the 2nd drive. So far it works well.

I am now trying to make myself like Windows 8 Enterprise and installed it as the only OS on the SSD for a while, but I ended up having to remove it as I missed a few things that Windows 7 has that Windows 8 doesn't have yet (RSAT tools in particular).