Hybrid Hard Drive?

I deleted a huge amount of server backups off my computer. It took all day for them to eventually disappear. Not long after the hard drive started crunching away and I couldn't use the computer. Even when I managed to gain control 'stuff' was no longer working as it once was. Rather than mess about waiting for the computer to defrag or to rebuild it's search index I have opted to wipe the hard drive and replace it with a hybrid drive off Ebay. The hard drive was the slowest part of the computer and needed to be upgraded anyway.

Hybrid Hard Drive?

I was going to purchase the new type of hard drive - SSD - solid state drive.

But as these are still quite expensive I have opted for a low cost option hence the Hybrid Drive ...

Ebay ...
Seagate 2 TB Desktop 3.5 Internal SSHD - SSD Speed and HDD Capacity Hard Drive

He wanted £69.99 for it but I only offered £60. He then came back with a counter offer of £65 which I accepted .

Seems a heck of a lot of fast drive for the money.

I will be using a program called Macrium Reflect Free to clone the hard drive. What this means is the hard drive I have now, which has everything reinstalled after being formatted first, will be copied bit by bit onto the new hard drive. In theory this should allow the new hard drive to be made active in no time at all instead of me having to go through the rigmarole of another re-installation of Windows and associated updates etc.

Macrium Reflect Free

Pretty sure the drive will rock. I will post an update once the work has been carried out. It is amazing how much bang for your bucks you can get now in the computer world.

Re: Hybrid Hard Drive?

New hard drive is working a treat . Computer boots a heck of a lot quicker and everything loads that much faster.

I used Macrium Reflect Free to clone the disk then used Windows own built in Disk Manager to merge the partitions into one big un. 2TB hard drive to fill up now. I will be using the old 250GB in the computer to store my server downloads instead of relying on the main. That means I will have 2 downloaded backups as I also run a 1TB external HD.

Damn good buy .

Re: Hybrid Hard Drive?

Hi

I am sure you know what you are talking about Mark, I have no idea

I just get a random teenager in, they seem to know about these things.

Re: Hybrid Hard Drive?

I don't understand either, Gibbs .... it sounds too clever for me

Re: Hybrid Hard Drive?

No - you would need a Computer Technician.

Re: Hybrid Hard Drive?

What is 'clever' at the end of the day - just something someone has decided to find out relative to their own interests. I have been very interested in computers so I have learned quite a lot about them. Knowing such stuff certainly doesn't make me any cleverer than anyone else just computer savvy.

Re: Hybrid Hard Drive?

A solid state drive is the primary drive in my main computer. It is a Kingston 240 gigabyte SSD. Not an expensive drive. If it went wrong, it could be replaced with a similar new one for just over £50 (Amazon price).

240 gigabytes may not seem a large drive by today's standards but this is enough to store quite a lot on. A fair number of heavy programs and games are installed yet only half the disk's space has been used. Also stored on it are the folders containing photos, video clips, documents and other user-created files. Still lots of gigabytes to go yet and no need to worry about running short of space.

The computer also has a second internal hard drive (D: drive), this being a 1 terabyte HDD. It is used for storing downloads and all sorts of miscellaneous programs and files. Disk images are stored on this drive too. The drive's contents are copied to an external USB 3.0 drive once in a while.

I haven't tried Macrium Reflect but have used Aomei Backupper and EaseUS ToDo. I had some trouble with both of these. Images made would not write back to the disk. However, this was all a while ago and I suspect it may have been something to do with UEFI. I later read that if I'd gone into the motherboard settings and changed them, I might have been able to use the images. Imaging programs can better deal with this aspect now I believe.

Windows 10 still includes the imaging function that was introduced with Windows 7. I find this is good enough and it's all I've used for some time now. I have had occasion to use the disk images for restoration or 'winding back' purposes. No problems experienced so far and I have a good degree of confidence in them working when needed.

Re: Hybrid Hard Drive?

Have splashed out on a Seagate 1tb hybrid drive (£65 from Amazon inc. pp).

The almost pathetic original 250gb was getting sluggish and has a few sectors by-passed/repaired so after reading this thread decided on a hybrid drive because of the assertion that they are quite a bit faster (they are ).

I used Aomei Backupper to disc-image the two partitions on the original drive to an external USB 1tb hard drive, replaced the original drive and then copied the C: disc image back to the new drive using the Aomei boot disk which I had made earlier. Time to re-boot.

All was well until I came to verify the size of the new drive - it was no different to the original then realised that it would be, the disc image copies all info across including the MBR settings. A quick launch of Paragon Partition Manager (free version) revealed the size of the drive in all its glory. Just had to extend the C: partition into the unallocated part of the drive, re-size it and then create another partition (F: in my case). Another re-boot and job done.

Very pleased with the speed (and the quiet) of the new drive. Thanks for the tip Mark.

Re: Hybrid Hard Drive?

My main computer is a number of times faster now. Does seem to be a great upgrade. Thinking of something similar for this computer. I use this one to run the TV. As I do not have a TV license it acts just like a massive monitor. Could do with a bit more poke though.