I don't get it why no one bothers to make hybrid 3,5 inch drives? Some ppl want speed and capacity for desktops as well...

I don't think it right that Toshiba outed these drives, I think it's a very personal thing and they should be able to come out when they feel they are ready... :p

Wonder if these will bring down the prices of the Seagate Momentus hybrid drives? Anyone here use a hybrid? how do they actually compare to a standard HDD?

UbErN00bI don't think it right that Toshiba outed these drives, I think it's a very personal thing and they should be able to come out when they feel they are ready... :p

Wonder if these will bring down the prices of the Seagate Momentus hybrid drives? Anyone here use a hybrid? how do they actually compare to a standard HDD?

So far the verdict is that they ARE better than standard drives with regards to many and repeated reads & writes, for example repeatedly opening and closing programs like Photoshop / Office / Or playing games with different level areas that you constantly travel back and forwards between, BUT in many cases, not significantly better.

Overall things do run smoother - and the drive thrashes less than a standard drive so in theory the mechanical components would actually last longer, assuming the "hybrid" ssd like components can last as long , which is unlikely as unlike an ssd where the load is evenly distributed over the entire memory - in a hybrid drive that little 8GB cache is under virtually 100% load almost all the time whilst using the drive.

So... if you would like your laptop running a bit smoother, but not too much, and you NEED larger storage volumes overall - they are nice - but in the long run if you really want performance, just man up and buy a real SSD. Its not like there's really such a huge price difference - relative to the cost of a high end Laptop that could actually use the performance to begin with, the price of a Good SSD really isn't that much at all, and if your laptop is a cheapo, well the performance increase really is wasted anyway.

Some say hybrids do work nicely in raid arrays, that have a large amount of "long term storage" data - and only a small amount of "working set" data - but I cant say much on that.