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Was wondering about one as an option for my old MBP, and a Mac Pro tower. The Seagate FireCudas have a 5 year warranty, FWIW.
I do have a WD Black 2 gig 7200rpm to use in my tower. Is it likely the hybrid would make it "snappier" booting up and the like? (after the frequently used files populate the solid state memory portion)
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Are SSD's not cheap enough? Grab thee a PCIe card and throw some SS boot storage at the tower. Way fast. Hybrids are faster than regular spinnies, and may make sense for the "old" MBP, depending on what the definition of "is", er, "old" is. Do some research, as some of those 2.5" hybrids have serious reliability issues (regardless of warranty), so even w/ a good warranty, there may be some risk of down time. The FireCuda being fairly new, may prove to be OK, just not enough data available yet (hopes are high, here, too).
Realistically, the FC's seem to get about 1.5 - 2X the performance of a spinnie, or about 35 - 40% of the performance of a decent SSD on a full speed SATA bus. So if your "old" MBP is old enough to only have SATA I bus speed, then that FireCuda makes all kinds of sense; if "old" is SATA II or III, then a real SSD is likely a better friend.
Good luck.
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I wouldn't use a hubrid drive... it'll quickly get full of itself...
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seriously though, get a real SSD for the tower. Just keep basic system on it. You should be able to get away with a 120GB, or maybe a 240GB SSD for that. All your other stuff, put on a regular drive in the tower.
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Racer X,
When. I got my 2012 mini, I also bought a 250GB SSD for it to go in the empty spot for the optical drive.
I tried it as a Fusion drive, marrying it to the 1TB 5400rpm native drive. Very fast. Decided to separate them. I did not need that much space. Left the 250 SSD as boot drive. Partitioned the 1TB into a backup clone and TM drive. I use externals for the home movies and backups for pictures, documents, and music that I don't use daily.
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I once had a drive with a 3 year warranty (HGST).
When it died after six months, its replacement was a refurbished drive with a 6 month warranty.
So: A 5 year warranty does not mean you are guaranteed to have a working drive for 5 years. In my case, a 3 year warranty ended up being one year.
I once had another drive, a Torqx SSD, with a 5 year warranty.
When it died after 2 years, it was replaced with a SLOWER, obsolete model (Warp) with no TRIM ability - I was given the choice of either the slower model or no replacement at all (Thanks, Patriot).
Better to go with a drive that has a good reputation rather than an unproven Seagate model.
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rz wrote:
I wouldn't use a hubrid drive... it'll quickly get full of itself...
Exquisite phrasing. Thank you.
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From what I understand, the SSD component of a hybrid drive is quite small - perhaps only 8 GB.
This makes it only big enough to hold your OS, and not your apps or anything else that gets used regularly.
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Sadly, more hype than actual help. Skip it, save for SSD...
Even a small 128 GB SSD just for OS/apps and all working files on a platter HDD will be big help.
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S. Pupp wrote:
I once had a drive with a 3 year warranty (HGST).
When it died after six months, its replacement was a refurbished drive with a 6 month warranty.
So: A 5 year warranty does not mean you are guaranteed to have a working drive for 5 years. In my case, a 3 year warranty ended up being one year.
I once had another drive, a Torqx SSD, with a 5 year warranty.
When it died after 2 years, it was replaced with a SLOWER, obsolete model (Warp) with no TRIM ability - I was given the choice of either the slower model or no replacement at all (Thanks, Patriot).
Better to go with a drive that has a good reputation rather than an unproven Seagate model.
I've had a couple of those situations in the past, and had to negotiate a "we'll cross that bridge if/when something happens to the replacement drive..." Very frustrating when you think you're getting a decent warranty. Though, FWIW, I've had better warranty experiences w/ Seagate than w/ some other manufacturers (notably WD). Still waiting on the jury for the FireCuda, but spec-wise it seems to make sense for an old SATA I MBP. What does cause concern is why Seagate is so overly sketchy about all of the real specs of the FireCuda; they seem to want to keep a lot (too much) info hidden.
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