I am debating between a couple of laptops. One has a 128gb SSD drive, the other a 500GB SSHD (Solid state hybrid drive).
I have no interest in buying a laptop with the lag of old style hard drives (I love SSD), but i'm intrigued by SSHD and the bigger capacity it offers. Also, the description of the SSHD drive says: "The drive uses only nonvolatile memory to store data instead of the spinning platters and moving heads. This results in fast access times and data transfer. This small form-factor drive has no moving parts. As a result it acts as a reliable storage device". Again, this sounds interesting and potentially appealing.
Is anyone here familiar with SSHD technology? Would you vouch for it, or would you recommend I just stick to SSD and take the smaller drive?
Not used one myself but my understanding is that the hybrid drive acts a bit like having faster/more cache. The solid state part does not show up as a separate drive and you can't chose to install stuff on it separately. At least that's what they were like the last time I looked.
When you can buy a £500 GB SSD for under £120 I would be tempted to look for something cheap like CornerFlag highlighted above and chuck one of these in:
Samsung 850 EVO 500 GB 2.5 inch Solid State DriveI have put Intel, Kingston, Crucial and SanDisk SSDs into my computers and they are all great after using HDDs but 128 GB is just too small for me unless its going in a desktop as a system drive. The Samsung EVOs though seem to have been the quickest for a while now.
The other bonuses with SSDs are light weight and better battery life which helps if it is going to be a portable.
Laptop manufacturers seem to want charge rather a lot for piddly little SSDs (which you can buy for ~£40) and charge Mac money for large or PCIE SSDs (even quicker). In many cases it will be cheaper to buy your own and if you do a clean windows install you also get the benefit of losing all the crap bundled software.