Thread: 5400rpm 1tb drive vs 500gb 7200 hybrid SSD in Dell?

I fixing to order a Dell 15z model, and am a little hesitant on which drive. The 15z with i7 cpu, 8gigs of ram and a 5400 rpm 1tb standard HDD is $100 less than the model with the i7, 500gb SSD hybrid 7200rpm and 8 gigs of ram.

The whole "hybrid" makes me a little skeptical. It's really going to be a school laptop for me, so Im kinda thinking i7 and 8 gigs of ram is plenty of performance, but I understand the hybrid drive is lower heat.

Any input would be greatly appreciated.

I bought my son a Toshiba with an i5, 6 GB ram and 1 TB HDD last summer for an engineering cirriculum. IMHO, you only need more power for gaming.

Figure that whatever you buy is not going to last a full 4 years. The average lifetime of a laptop is less than 2 years due to the jostling and general abuse.

Yepp, Intel recommends an i5 is my scenario as well, but since pricing is close I was gonna go ahead and get the i7 over the i5 and another 2 gigs of ram, just not sure on those two hdd's. The hybrid thing worries me a bit, just because I have no experience with them. Ive actually been lucky, most of my laptops have lasted 4-5 years

Found some good info on the hybrid drive and opted for it. This is what I went with, should be plenty for me:

i7-2640M processor 2.80 GHz
15.6" 1080p display
NVIDIA GeForce GT525M 2GB
500GB SATA (7,200 RPM) Solid State Hybrid
Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
8GB,DDR3,2 DIMM, 1333MHz

Originally Posted by Jason Whiddon

Found some good info on the hybrid drive and opted for it. This is what I went with, should be plenty for me:

i7-2640M processor 2.80 GHz
15.6" 1080p display
NVIDIA GeForce GT525M 2GB
500GB SATA (7,200 RPM) Solid State Hybrid
Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
8GB,DDR3,2 DIMM, 1333MHz

Explain what you found out about the hybrid, exactly what is it, and how does it work?

Sent from my iPad using SatelliteGuys

Originally Posted by rockymtnhigh

Explain what you found out about the hybrid, exactly what is it, and how does it work?

Sent from my iPad using SatelliteGuys

It is basically a 500GB HDD with a 4GB SSD drive attached. It has technology added that can determine what data is accessed the most and will benefit form the SSD storage and move it to the SSD for better performance. Some of the newer drives have move to 8GB of SSD for more cacheing capabilities.

The hybrid drive will be much faster. Not as fast as a true SSD, but much faster than any 5400 rpm drive. I would not buy a 5400 rpm drive for a laptop, unless you've got to have that terabyte. 7200 rpm makes a big difference to begin with, and that additional SSD buffer may further improve performance in certain cases.

Sent from my iPhone using SatelliteGuys

As well as reduced heat and better power usage. Should boot real fast which is nice. One con is, when you do need info on the spun down drive, it has to spin up to access it, but overall it seems most people are positive about the hybrid drives.

Thanks. Makes sense.