Geeky Question.
Any one using one? For £65 delivered for a 500gb which is twice as fast as a 7200rpm drive and 6-7 times cheaper than an equivalent storage ssd, it seems the obvious choice.

Would like to hear if anyone is using them?

Depends on your use, in benchmarks they're good but if your regularly used stuff doesn't fit in the SSD cache area it'll be no faster than a standard HD for some things.

There are separate SSD cache solutions which do the same thing with your existing mechanical HD's, might be worth a look.

I'd go with an SSD for boot drive with your apps on it and just use mechanical HD's for storage.

Or just stick in an extra 16GB or 24GB of RAM, with superfetch (if you run vista, 7 or 8) it'll start caching all the regularly used stuff after it hits the desktop so once that's done for the day everything is in RAM which is even faster than SSD.

I have a 30Gb Corsair Accelerator drive running alongside my Samsung F1. There were a few early teething problems with the duplex software but they were soon rectified. But how well does it work?

Fantastic is the answer. Boot up times (win7) are halved, switching users is near instant as is resume from standby and starting programs is instant too. The only issue I have is that i cannot take an image of my HD (using Acronis) unless I dsiable it. This is when I truly notice the massive difference it makes. On first or fresh install it does take a day or two of normal use to adjust itself but it was well worth the £30 I paid and far surpasses other upgrades at that price point. Basically it won't speed the running of programs or games but it is the general tasks of switching etc.

Worth a try.

Yes I have a couple of 750gb Seagate XT drives. Certainly seemed to help the misses laptop which I replaces as it was too small for our music. Boots a little quicker etc.

Got one in my laptop as well but not noticed much difference as its a second drive.

I have an ssd in my 17" hp but only 120gb. Need more internal storage and saw a 500gb sshd for a reasonable cost of £60 im thinking it maybe reasonable compromise. Cant fork out for a high capacity ssd atm

Sorry never memtion for a single drive laptop. No extra space for full mechanical drives thereafter

In that case the hybrid drive probably is the best solution.

The 2.5" hybrid drives I can see seem to have 8GB flash so that's certainly enough to make a worthwhile difference.

More RAM would help as well, but would most likely be even more expensive.

I've got a 100gb SSD in my laptop which I use for all of my car diagnostic stuff and a bit of browsing, it transformed the laptop into a rocketship compared to before.

I have a 200gb SSD in my desktop along with a 1TB hard drive and use the SSD for my OS and whatever games are the flavour of the month. I wouldn't contemplate a standard hard drive as my main disc nowadays.

Since I bought my first SSD I have not purchased a HDD since!

I have a Patriot Inferno 60Gb in my desktop. It must be 3 years old now. Rock solid performer.
Crucial M4 120Gb in both my laptops. One laptop is 5 years old and it runs as good as a basic new laptop on W7 64 with 3Gb Ram.
Kingston 128Gb in my dads laptop must be going on 3 years old now.
Kingston 64Gb spare/test drive.

I have a hybrid on my HP ultrabook. SSD is used for boot only (takes 9 secs for Win7) and is 16gb - 500gb normal drive seems fast as anything I use Would recommend them.

What is this 'booting' of which you speak? Three or four seconds from standby... does Windows not do that?

Standby with 48GB of RAM would probably take longer than a reboot, haha.

Standby, not hibernation...

Oh right, for me that would be a waste of power to leave it in standby overnight to "save" a few mins each morning while the machine boots before I need it anyway.

I have some HD's set to spin down, monitor into standby etc. after 30 mins, but that's it.

With superfetch my PC is basically back to everything commonly used being cached in RAM similar to when it was shut down, within a few mins of a fresh boot. eg. right now I'm showing 36GB cached, since it was booted about 15 hours ago, although I've been streaming movies a bit tonight which pushes it up more than usual.

My laptop idles for about two weeks, or kills the battery with heavy use in around two and a half hours. So it's running around 1/200th of the normal current, around 400mW I guess.

I keep thinking about a solar 12v supply and a switch-mode to feed the thing...

My biggest problem is actually booting windows in the virtual machine - not that it's particularly slow to boot, but that it gets used so rarely it needs to spend two hours downloading and installing updates and restarting itself. You'd think MS had never heard of update in place...