Choose which drive does storage duty- NOT gonna be easy.

Ill try and be as to the point as possible as i tend to ramble.

I bought a new gaming/desktop replacement laptop - Qosmio X775-3DV80
http://www.toshibadirect.com/td/b2c/pdet.to?poid=2000010961

Its fast,But i wanted fast as possible. The only thing missing was a full blown SSD drive so i added a Kingston HyperX 120GB drive that runs windows and apps.
Games and storage go to drive D.
Even tho it has two drive slots no Raid is available so that means i need to pick the fastest drive i own to put in drive 2. These are the two that came in the rig, It looks and sounds easy as to which to use until i show you the Atto benchmarks.

Seagate Momentus XT 500GB (7200rpm, Hybrid 4GB Serial ATA)
Toshiba 750GB (5400rpm, Serial ATA )





The 5400rpm drive is much better in atto tests, But ive read reviews that benchmark don't show the true ability of the SSD/Hybrid drives.

Even this review had a hard time showing any advantages to the Hybrid drive: http://thessdreview.com/our-reviews...ive-review-ssd-performance-with-hdd-capacity/

So should i take the Atto benchmarks at face value and go with what it says is faster? Or trust benchmarks i cant run or see the results in?

Im not worried about GB's 500 or 750 is the same to me as ill never use that much, Im more concerned about speed. I later may add a larger SSD and not even worry about it, But for now im too broke buying all this.

It probably doesn't show in benchmarks because I doubt it is using the cache at all. It will only cache the most used programs and should become quicker over time.

That being said, the cache is only 4GB so I am not sure how much benefit there would be, seeing that games are easily twice that size nowadays. There doesn't seem to be much of a difference in transfer between the two either on the mechanical, so I would just use the 750GB drive seeing as it is larger.

The SSD as the main drive should make the computer more responsive regardless of the second drive.

I think you need a benchmark that takes access times into account as well. The cached 7200rpm drive ought to kill the 5400 rpm drive in access times, even without the cache working fully.

Ill agree about the 4Gb of cache being non-issue when your loading giant sized games, Everything small is on my SSD drive.
The 5400 does bench better also, But as David says the access time would be a good deciding factor.
Ill hit both drives with AS SSD Benchmark and just do the access runs as the others were taking hours to run on mechanical drives.
Know a better benchmark for access?

I wont be running these till later as im doing more game installs and updates on that drive.
What really gets me is the 5400 beats the snot out of the 7200 in almost every Atto chunk size across the board.
That alone seems really odd despite the whole platter count theory of larger drives.

Not that it would help me now, But i would have liked to tested just how much speed was gained as the drive learned on boot up. It wasnt slow by any means bone stock with the hybrid as the boot drive, But it didnt even come close to my SSD boot times.
Last count is 13-15 seconds depending on how fast my counting in my head is, Nothing scientific going on here!

In the end im looking to see just how much storage i really to max out at and see if i cant squeeze it all on another 240GB SSD, Faster game loads would be fun albeit not necessary when everything else is fast.
Since ive been around 11 years now and disappear for years at a time, Its always been my dream to have an all SSD run pc/laptop if you search back about 6 years ago lol

HDTune is probably a better bench for mechanical hard drives and access times. Also I would imagine that if you are putting large games on the XT it would learn to get faster the more you play.

Toss up. The cache is only going to load the most frequently accessed data on it. After it fills up it will dump the oldest/least access files and repeat.

As for speed. I have a 750Gig in my laptop, think its a 5,400RPM drive but it does very nice for itself. Very fast, though it might not be the snappiest things its large. I do have many games on it and seems to work nicely as my OS resides on a 128Gig SSD.

To get some more benefits I'd probably start leaning toward that 500Gig Hybrid drive myself.

Well I'd take the drive with e best sequential reads and here's why:

The only thing you need to load quick off at drive will be games. Almost all games rely heavily on sequential reads, map loading etc.

Movies and media don't need ultra fast access times to open: realistically I doubt you'll ever notice the difference between opening a movie from a 5400 vs 7200 rpm drive.

That being said you need to run a benchmark that goes over the entire length of the drive. The 750gb drive will not diminish as quickly in speed as the 500gb....(spinning circle concept)...just spent some time calculating it at 302gb the drives are spinning at the same rate (assuming 2.5" disc and .75" diameter unusable for spindle)....so if you have more than 300gb of data the 500 will start to slow for access times. Additionally the 750gb is also newer and probably has better tech which is why it's reading faster sequentially.

I hit both drives with the suggested benches and a few others, Some HDTune iirc wouldn't allow write tests. These pics below are the benches of the Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid 4GB SSD 500GB drive.

Tests below are of the Toshiba 5400rpm 750gb drive.

Me looking at them? Im lost in a sea of numbers and i actually know what they mean. Its just so many and each drive has good points and bad points when comparing the two.

The one factor we cant really measure is that 4gb of SSD Hybrid insertion in the 7200 XT drive. If one test could take that into account against the 5400 drive it would make this more clear imo.

Ill await your suggestions and thoughts, But i think ill keep both drives until i upgrade or downgrade in some eyes to a 250GB SSD storage drive.

I have 78GB used on the storage drive now, And only 23GB used on my 128GB SSD boot/Windows drive. And thats with about 5 games installed and im no big gamer as much a most. I like to play tho.
I dont save movies as i have Netflix.
So by the time i can afford the 250GB SSD ill know if i can live with just 370GB total of HDD space. Plus Ill sell one drive off to pay for the SSD and buy a USB 3.0 case for one of these drives as mass storage if needed as i should be able to get good speeds threw that.

With such little storage needs I'd go with the xt 500... T advantage of the extra space wont come into account.
Also put your frequently played games on the ssd it's much faster!