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Replacement laptop HD

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I'm currently shopping around for a new hard drive, because I dropped my laptop several times and it tested bad with Crystal Disc Info. I went to Best Buy to do some price comparison. I saw a 1TB SSHD for $119.99 and they had a normal HDD for 79.99. My question is the SSHD worth the extra $40? Will I see a speed increase over the HDD?
 

Kursah

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I upgraded my Dell 3450's stock crappy 500GB HDD with a Seagate 1TB SSHD a few months ago (along with an additional 4GB ram) for around $130 shipped. Was well worth it. The SSHD was $99 back then.

I noticed a huge difference in boot times for both Ubuntu 14.4 and Windows 8.1. General usage was much faster too. If you do some research, you will find that SSHD's are using their SSD cache for most commonly used items, so OS booting, your most used programs, games, etc...whatever it can fit on that 8GB cache (I think it's 8GB...). So in short yes it helps, is it an AMAZING difference? No...but it's a good middle-ground.

I also stuck full-size 3.5" 1TB SSHD in my G/F's rig as her other HDD was starting to show SMART errors for sector rewrites (or similar), but still made a perfect backup drive. This upgrade made quite a nice difference as well. OS loads WAY faster, common programs load WAY faster, her and the kids noticed greatly (This PC also went from Windows 7 to 8.1 with this swap..which makes quite a difference), and overall usage is faster as well. The old drive was a Seagate 1.5TB 64GB 7200RPM...it was never really fast though, I had never been impressed with it.

In the case of going from slower HDD's to an SSHD, it has been a great upgrade. Gives a varied improvement in speed all the way around, benches, real usage, etc. There are spots where it will be equal to another standard 7200RPM drive though. But where it excels it's awfully nice.

Maybe look on Amazon and shop around beyond best Buy? It's under $100 on Amazon and is Prime if you have a membership (I'm a student so I get a discounted rate, but after next year I'm still going to keep it as I use Amazon sooooo much).

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B99JUBQ/?tag=tec06d-20

Here's the query from a simple Google search to get you going on research too, enjoy and keep us posted!

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=SSHD+vs+HDD
 
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Thank you for your quick response! After reading your reply, I will definitely get one. However, I'm going to wait till my current hard drive goes kaput.

Do you have any experience with the dual drives? If I'm not satisfied with the SSHD, I had my eyes on one of those dual drives from WD.

The SSD portion of the drive received some luke-warm reviews. I believe it's 1 TB HDD with 120 GB SSD. It is a little pricey; $200.00
 

Kursah

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I have used the DVD swap drive for a laptop, not my personal ones. But it does work. Issues I found were if the firmware/chipset are designed to set idle power or not. I would put the SSD/OS drive in the OE spot and the data drive in the DVD spot.

The WD one sounds like a cool combo idea, but it's execution is a generation or two away from being what we would expect from it imho.
 
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I'm lost on the DVD swap drive part. Are you saying you used a HDD in that spot??
 
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At my lenovo y510p, I put a ssd in the place of original sshd, this sshd I put in a generic caddy and replace the the optical drive, work well, but at my gf laptop, lenovo g510, the replacement of optical drive don't work well, because of chipset/firmware who force the caddy to enter in sleep too aggressive, because of that, it start to have some errors in smart(the hdd form caddy), so I put in a external usb enclosure, so depend on firmware/chipset on your model of laptop, you must test it(a generic caddy it is 10-15$).
I used for some weeks my laptop with hdd 7200rpm, original sshd(8gb flash+5400rpm) and now ssd, I find the ssd the best option, and hdd vs sshd, it is like this, if you use laptop most for torrent/copy files/dc++, stay with hdd 7200rpm, if use most for anything else, go with sshd(if you have no money for a ssd), I find that sshd it is almost like a ssd, until the cache it is full or I start to copy lot of data...
 
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I'm currently shopping around for a new hard drive, because I dropped my laptop several times and it tested bad with Crystal Disc Info. I went to Best Buy to do some price comparison. I saw a 1TB SSHD for $119.99 and they had a normal HDD for 79.99. My question is the SSHD worth the extra $40? Will I see a speed increase over the HDD?

It's not worth it. hybrid hard disk drives are still quite slow, it uses a disk just like traditional HDD, so there is little benefit. Only the cache portion is solid state. Definitely worth it only if its the same price, but I wouldn't pay extra for it.

I find that sshd it is almost like a ssd, until the cache it is full or I start to copy lot of data...

It's nothing like an SSD, because the read / write, speed is no faster than a good regular hard disk. typically 70-130MB/sec
 
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