So I've ordered most of the things I'm going to order for my new PC from amazon and frozencpu thanks to myus.com, and have a plane ticket to Singapore booked so I can go to get the mobo, ram, and processor myself.

The only component I haven't yet ordered/decided on is storage. I have a couple of things to consider:

- I don't want to have to keep upgrading. Every time I get a computer, I think it has enough memory to last me for ages, then I end up filling it up within 6 months. This time I want terrabytes, at least a few.

- Noise isn't an issue, I don't care if my memory is "silent" or not

- The build is already costing more than double what I had initially intended it to. If I spring for a big stack of SSDs, there is a high chance of my girlfriend throwing the whole thing out the window before it even gets built.

So, current options are:

- 1x 64gb SSD for OS boot in raid 1, then 2x 1.5tb WD Black in raid 0+1.

- A few hybrid drives clumped together in raid 0+1.

The issue is that I have no experience at all with hybrid drives, and I'd love to hear from someone with first hand experience of their performance. I'm also interested to know if anyone has any idea of differences in quality between different brands. I see OCZ does a 1tb hybrid drive for about $450, while Seagate has 500gb hybrid drives for $150. Is there any difference in physical design between the two?

Thanks in advance for any help or useful opinions.

With some work, you could put laptop drives into your desktop machine, which means you can utilize a wider variety of hybrid drives. Seagate is currently offering the 750gb Momentus XT for about $180 at Newegg. (OEM edition) An extra $30 to get an extra 250gb should be an nice improvement, in my opinion.

As I understand it, you would need a "2.5" to "3.5" converter or bracket if you go with laptop drives, so you could fit it into the drive rails for a standard desktop.

Is there any downside to that? I've read that the ones designed for laptops can have issues when stacked in RAID.

At the moment I think I'm just going to go with the normal "old fashioned" hard drives and a small SSD for Windows.

Chao ban. Ban staying for how long?

It'll be 2nd till the 4th of next month, literally just a quick shopping trip :)

SSD and separate drives for storage, there's no contest when it comes to speed between a good SSD (go with Intel) and a hybrid drive.

My only problem with that is that it means running all my games off the HDD. I could fit them all on two 512gb SSDs, but once again I'd be breaking the bank, and I'd still need the additional 1.5tb HDD for media storage regardless.

Also, the Intel SSDs seem to be almost twice as expensive as all the others - is there a hardware based reason for that?

With enough RAM most games wouldn't get paged to the disk anyway, so there's no real performance benefit to running them off of a SSD besides somewhat faster loading times. They manufacture everything themselves, from the controller to the actual memory the disk is based on; they have the highest reliability out there, so if you consider it to be an investment and don't want to upgrade anytime soon it's money well spent on excellent build quality and support.

See, that's what I thought, except usually buying directly from the manufacturer is much cheaper as it means there are less hands in the pie. For some reason in this case, buying directly from the manufacturer means paying considerably more.

Still, if I'm only getting one big enough for Windows I guess it's ok.

I wouldn't recommend an SSD for your main drive unless you get a rather good one. I used a Kingston and it was rubbish, after it broke down and I switched to a regular Western Digital HD, my computer actually sped up.

I don't know, unfortunately. However, Seagate doesn't yet offer hybrid drives specifically for the desktop, though those may come later this year. As far as I know, Seagate's only Hybrid Drive series that is currently available is the Momentus XT, which comes as two generations, so the older models are apt to have the issues you mentioned.

How exactly are you going to build a RAID1 set with "1x 64gb SSD for OS boot" or a RAID0+1 with "2x 1.5tb WD Black"?
The minimum for those RAID sets are 2 drives and 4 drives, respectively.

Personally I'd buy only the essential drives now because they're still overpriced.
And I wouldn't get hybrid drives because the content on my drives (except for the OS) is changing a lot and I seem to recall them being best suited for static content.. but I haven't done any research :P

I love my 500 GB Momentus, but I have no idea how it would suit you in a RAID setup. I've read that through RAID 0 you can archive files to an SSD so that you can get the speed benefits of SSD and the storage capacity of a classic disk drive. I read about that on Tom's Hardware, don't know how it works in practice, though. You might need some very modern hardware, in addition.

My Momentus has 3GB of SSD storage, I believe, and though its greatest benefits are supposed to be for the most used content (I believe its supposed to have a smart management system, not just the most recent material), and my laptop isn't actually capable of handling the full throughput, I seem to be getting all of the potential benefits it provides. I notice there's sometimes a bit of a delay at startup, but once it's part way in it shoots to the finish (I should probably time it, but it impresses me, nonetheless). I also particularly like how much it's sped up shutdown, it was becoming a real pain previously (would take in excess of 30 seconds, sometimes it failed to shut down).

The only issue I had with it was that I needed to upgrade the firmware, which was scary for my dead battery mag-safe, I did that because I noticed regular high frequency beeping, and the firmware seems to have pretty much nullified that. If you get a new one, hopefully that shouldn't be an issue. The install's not much pain, but it's just a bit stressful.

RAID requires RAID-rated disks. Anything less is asking for inexplicable failures and collapses of your array (probably with 100% data loss, unless you are RAID 1).

Disks that are not RAID-rated have firmware that does not have the full capabilities required to maintain a RAID array, even if they are the same physically.

Western Digital RE4-GP drives, if you can get them in the chaotic HDD market, are especially good for RAID setups.

Momentus XT drives are quite efficient stand-alone drives. I use one on my laptop and am very happy with it.

The raid issue is debated. Some seem to have had data integrity issues with XT's in raid 0 configs. Other report spectacular results.



You do indeed get the best out of them with frequently used pieces of software. The content doesn't need to be static though as the drive will adapt. I mean anything you use more than a few times will eventually be more responsive.

If I were to use one in a desktop, I would use it as primary disk for my OS and prefered software, and would add a 2 TB HDD for storage and games