SSHD or SSD vs Laptop replacement

[Chris25555555]

Hey,

 

I would really appreciate if anyone who has experience with this stuff could give me some tips about this.

 

My Situation:

I have a relatively old HP Probook 4730s. A small Ikea Table went on it and the display was broke. Everythink else is still working. I replaced the display with a new one and everything worked fine.
At the time I installed a fresh windows 7 university license and had some driver issues. I had some unlocated main system devices, but  there was no reference what driver I need. I installed ALL the available drivers from the HP website. Due to the fact that I live in Germany the things were called "Basissystemgerät". Everything worked fine until a few weeks ago. I do a lot of drum-multitrack recording... I was surprised how well that goes along with only 4gb of ram while recording over 20 tracks in 24bit, 44kHz. Anyway until yesterday everything worked fine exept some stability issues.

Since yesterday I cannot copy files, I cannot move files into or out of the computer. I double checked that this is not a driver or some kind of other windows problem. I checked at university and saw that the hdd drive is dead and that it is a miracle that I could turn the computer on...

 

My questions:

1.) Should I keep the laptop? I DO NOT need a dedicated graphics card in my laptop since the only things I need it for is audioproduction / recording and MS Office.

I do not know if it is worth the 150 Euros upgrading the latptop with a proper storage device or simply go with a new one. The only thing that is not so great about this laptop is that it is very heavy and big.

If you would go for a new one, maybe you could give me some examples where I should start. That would be great!

2.) IF I decide to go for a new Storage device and leave the rest of the laptop as it is, what would you recommend? Going for like a 500gb SSD or a SSHD hybrid drive with 1tb of storage. I definitly can live without that 1tb, because I do backups of all the audio production I need almost every time I record or produce.

 

Thank you for your answers in advance.

Greetings from Germany, 

 

Chris

 

PS.: feel free to correct my english if you want to, I am not a native speaker and still learning.

[Mark77]

2nd generation i-Series (ie: Sandy Bridge).  Still should be decent performance-wise.  A SSD is a re-usable asset -- can remove it and put it in a new(er) laptop, or put it into a desktop if you don't end up using the laptop. 

 

Samsung 850 Pro, Crucial MX200, Intel 530/535/730 series SSDs are good.  8gb DDR3 SODIMMs are cheap too. 

[Curufinwe_wins]

SSHD's are really shitty and never recommended. Worst of both worlds.

[Unhelpful]

27 minutes ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

SSHD's are really shitty and never recommended. Worst of both worlds.

How so? You get a reasonably fast HDD with a small amount of flash storage for cache. They're actually pretty good.

 

I still recommend just an SSD.

[Curufinwe_wins]

10 minutes ago, JoeyDM said:

How so? You get a reasonably fast HDD with a small amount of flash storage for cache. They're actually pretty good.

 

I still recommend just an SSD.

The cache is too small to realistically help in many situations (for 8GB variants. 32GB variants do offer a real service but are so expensive that I wouldn't recommend them), and it still suffers from all the failures of HDD's (poor maximum access times, high power consumption, poor random performance, effectively 0 multi-stream support, significant degradation over lifetime). It isn't even faster anymore on long reads/writes (commercial HDD's are hitting the 200 MB/s mark now and the sub 110 MB/s mark still being hit by SSHD's is really bad).

 

Add that they are generally 3-5x more expensive per gig than HDD's well lol (for 2.5'' drive. Only about 2-3x more for 3.5' drives). Just get a SSD or an SSD and a scratch HDD.