Who's interested in hybrid drives poll

[BuzzKillington]

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-Details.asp?EdpNo=6280178&sku=TMD-500AS4&srkey=Solid%20State%20Hybrid%20Drive

I wanted to start a poll to see how many members would be interested in a raid array with these drives. Perhaps if enough members were interested, Seagate may be kind enough to let us give 2 of them for a spin?

[PauL]

I wouldnt mind seeing just one of them against a mainstream SSD drive

[BuzzKillington]

here's the specs on the SSD Tiger used in their video (except the 256gb version):

http://img696.imageshack.us/img696/7796/5348full.jpg

[Trace]

I would love to get a pair of these to review. I have a SSD to put them up against even.

[Zephik]

These things are pretty much just as fast as the lower-end to middle-end class SSD's go, right? Isn't a normal HDD like 70MB/s read and write? Hmm, actually, I think I might be thinking of 5400rpm drives... what's 7200rpm?

[BuzzKillington]

I think read on a 7200 is around 90mbps read. Doesn't look like they advertise those specs on HDD's. Weird.

[artoodeeto]

one thing I wonder about is since SSDs have a limited number of erase cycles that can be performed on each whatchamahoozie (totally blanking on the, er...non-technical layman's term... right now LOL), how long will those 4GB last. I guess what I wonder is how does the drive use those 4GB? Does the user have direct control or does the drive govern itself? Would it continually assess what data you access most and (if you're gaming or saving/reading new files all the time) be moving data in and out of that 4GB? I would just worry the thing would burn out, at least the SSD part, long before a pure SSD died, and thus you will have paid a premium on this drive for what amounts to a temporary performance gain.
Don't get me wrong - it looks cool, and since I need another internal drive to augment my SSD I'll keep one of these in mind for when I have the $$.

[x88x]

Artoo, don't worry about the NAND getting erased too many times. It's SLC NAND, which generally has in the hundreds of thousands or possible rewrites instead of the tens of thousands for recent MLC NAND. Even with MLC though, I saw one review where they figured out how long it would take for an OCZ Vertex to run through all it's erase cycles (35,000, iirc), and they figured out that if you do a full erase each day (incredibly unlikely; normally you probably won't do more than a few GB per day if that), it would still be something like 15 years before the drive died (I forget what the calculations were atm, but it was more complex than just 1 cycles per day).

[Zephik]

As long as the drive lasts at least 5 years I'm good. In that time I'll probably have upgraded anyways.

[artoodeeto]

kewl. this is a good, realistic alternative to another SSD, and LOTS of storage space to boot. I'll keep it in mind when I have some cash...

[BuzzKillington]

Sorry about bumping, but I wanted to get this thread a little more attention/votes before going to seagate or TD about possibly reviewing their drives.

[msmrx57]

I'm definitely interested, just too broke right now to spend the money. It is probably what I'd buy if we had to replace a drive though.

[x88x]

If I weren't running SSDs already I would be very interested. Sub-$100 500GB drive that utterly obliterates the Velociraptor drives? Hells yeah!