Seagate Firecuda SSHD(laptop drive)

[KhandakeF]

Are these any good? It has a disk spin rate of 5400 rpm and my current (low-end) laptop also has a 5400rpm sshd and it isn't that fast.

 

I would guess a modern gamer-oriented drive would be much faster then a drive meant for a cheap laptop, but should I try and find a 7200rpm drive instead?

 

 

[tarmacd]

They will increase speed in some aspects, such as load times, os launch, etc... But, the thing to keep in mind, is that it won't do it immediately. It will take time for it to cache commonly accessed programs and the like, to the solid state portion of the drive. Depending on the capacity of drive you intend to install, and budget, just about any ssd out there will be your best bet.

[KhandakeF]

The firecuda I'm looking at is a 2tb drive at less then 100$. a 1tb sata ssd from amazon costs 260+.

[KenjiUmino]

spinning HDD portable device = bad idea. always.

 

with that out of the way, the SSD cache on the firecuda drives is only like 256 megabytes AFAIK - that's a joke and i don't think that cache will do much good. 

 

if i had to choose i'd rather take a 7200 rpm or a ssd

 

37 minutes ago, KhandakeF said:

a 1tb sata ssd from amazon costs 260+.

do you even need a 1tb SSD ? 

 

if your laptop has mSATA or m.2 you install a SSD there and keep the spinner as data drive

[tarmacd]

17 minutes ago, KenjiUmino said:

spinning HDD portable device = bad idea. always.

 

with that out of the way, the SSD cache on the firecuda drives is only like 256 megabytes AFAIK - that's a joke and i don't think that cache will do much good. 

 

if i had to choose i'd rather take a 7200 rpm or a ssd

 

do you even need a 1tb SSD ? 

 

if your laptop has mSATA or m.2 you install a SSD there and keep the spinner as data drive

All of the 2.5 inch firecuda drives have 8gb of nand flash memory. There are plenty of videos out there that show they work faster, but it's hard to quantify. Benchmarking is all but impossible, because it works much like Intel's octane drives. It will learn over time what is most used, and will adapt accordingly by storing those portions of programs in the nand.

[tarmacd]

1 hour ago, KhandakeF said:

The firecuda I'm looking at is a 2tb drive at less then 100$. a 1tb sata ssd from amazon costs 260+.

If you need that much on-board, then the firecuda is the way to go. Personally, I'd throw in a 250-500gb ssd, and use your recovered drive for mass storage. They make cheap af enclosures to put hdd's in to convert them to external usb 3 storage.

[KhandakeF]

1 hour ago, tarmacd said:

If you need that much on-board, then the firecuda is the way to go. Personally, I'd throw in a 250-500gb ssd, and use your recovered drive for mass storage. They make cheap af enclosures to put hdd's in to convert them to external usb 3 storage.

Actually, I'm asking this because I'm getting a new laptop and it has only a 256gb m.2 ssd

[tarmacd]

26 minutes ago, KhandakeF said:

Actually, I'm asking this because I'm getting a new laptop and it has only a 256gb m.2 ssd

Then the only speed increase that will be realized then, is if you install programs, and run them regularly off of that drive. You will notice barely any difference if you are using it for movies, music, files and the like. If just using it as a scratch disk, go cheap and reliable.

[KhandakeF]

7 hours ago, tarmacd said:

Then the only speed increase that will be realized then, is if you install programs, and run them regularly off of that drive. You will notice barely any difference if you are using it for movies, music, files and the like. If just using it as a scratch disk, go cheap and reliable.

So other then for commonly used things that will get stored in nand flash, it'll have similar speeds to my cheap laptop sshd now? 

 

Also this is my current laptop drive that came with this cheap one

[tarmacd]

Unless you have a ton of stuff to put in it, save the money and scavenge your old drive for storage.

[KhandakeF]

How about this one 

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01DOL05OC/ref=ox_sc_act_title_4?smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&psc=1