Judas

Recently i had the oppertunity to play around with this drive... after a little research on the internet i decided to go with one of the best on the market..

it's not the big drive... i was trying to grab the 320gb but it was lacking in stock.... so i was forced to get the 500gb... no big deal.

Anyways.. installed this drive as a replacement in a customers computer here. A dell with the intel ICH7M sata chipset that only allows for AHCI mode (no raid or anything... which isn't an issue)

So taking into consideration that we are dealing with a relatively oldish style chipset on the system... running windows 7 x64 home premium.. and pentium dual core T4400 @ 2.20GHZ as well as 4gb of ram...

So these seagate drives have 4GB of fairly high speed Solid state goodness, and then the remainder is all standard drive space. The way i understand the seagate info is that Defragging the hardrive will result in the SSD part being wiped, and reorganizes the drive as usual like any other drive would.

The drive while used will automatically run it's own internal programming of sorts to move the most commonly used files and important windows / programs into the SSD while you use it, and it doesn't appear to do this slowly, it's pretty much done by the time you reboot.

So i installed windows 7, didn't appear to install really any faster then any other standard 7200rpm hardrive. Still speedy enough considering the laptop.

Go into windows and started installing the critical files.... chipset drives, rapid storage controller device drivers including the intel rapid storage program itself... video/audio/etc. Rebooting as necessary.

The first thing i did was the rapid storage, which requires a reboot... this is probably the fastest thing to do in order to force a reboot quickly. So i'd say maybe a minute or 2 in windows and then reboot. Just in that small amount of time apparently seagate is able to move enough stuff into the SSD part of the drive to really make things speed up.

My reboot was almost instant. It's almost equivilent to the startup time for my Vertex 3 at home on the i7 super rig. Seriously, i was already quite impressed.

By the time i got everything else installed.. software and such... the system reboot or cold boots were even faster.

I set the system to auto defrag once a week.. but i think i may change it to once a month after i had defragged the drive once already and saw no real benefit to doing so as indeed it had to take a reboot.. followed by waiting a few minutes after it had started up for it to relocate the files needed to speed things up again.

The drives price is reasonable... considering it's relatively massive speed improvement. I would indeed say massive when it comes to boot times.... standard transfer rates were excellent copying files around big or small.

If your looking for a some of the awesomeness of a Solid State drive but aren't in dires need of the constant top end solid state transfer rates, these hybrid drives are probably exactly what you'd like.

And additional benefit is that i understand using them in RAID 0 works perfectly fine too.

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Takaharu

Hmm... I should look into this rapid storage thing. I have one of those drives in my netbook.
I'm not expecting the Earth here; it's a netbook after all but considering you described it as a normal speed 7200 until you installed it, it's gotta be worth a go.

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Matth

A lot of firmware troubles and bugs with those drives - if you set it to spin down, make sure it does actually manage to spin up again - Seagate are definitely off my list, as they have dropped the ball rather too many times with bad firmware.

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Mary had a little lamb,
Her father shot it dead
Now Mary takes her lamb to school,
Between two crusts of bread

Judas

no problem here..

i don't setup my computers to go into sleep mode or hibernate..

only the laptops..

and the one i've here has hibernated and slept and has the standard i think 10 minute hardrive sleep state.. and has always woken up.

although i beleive i have the latest revision...

All i know is the speeds are pretty good

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Takaharu

I did a little research on Rapid Storage and established it's an Intel thing. Not really the sort of thing that I can expect to work on an AMD system.
I also checked the Seagate website for firmware updates just for good measure. I got the latest firmware, 25, but when I installed it I found that I have 26 installed, which is a tad odd.

I'm not having any issues with the harddrive, nor do I think it's running slowly so this isn't really a problem, it's just odd.

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Judas

yeah mine is firemware version 26 as well..

and indeed.. rapid storage controller drivers are only for intel ICH7/8/9/10/R/M's

although the intel storage matrix controller software will work on some of the older devices.

still only an intel thing..

I'm not to pleased with the ATI/AMD southbridge controller or SATA chipsets.... Just wish intel had a full blown multi pci-ex linked sata chipset... like a ICH11R with 6 SATA III 6gbps ports

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