Where can I get an SSD hybrid kit?

[Braedley]

I want to speed up some load times for my games, but unfortunately, a pure SSD solution isn't very practical for me due to the poor $/GB of larger drives (I need at least a 128GB if I were to go pure SSD). One option is the new Seagate 500GB HDD with 4GB SSD, and can be had for $130 at TigerDirect, however I'm not sure if 4GB will be enough for some of my load-heavy games (I'm looking at you, Borderlands). I've seen hybrid kits online where you have to supply your own two drives, and that seems like it be more of what I'd need. I could pick up a small size (<=64GB) dive for well under $200. The only thing is, I can't find any of these kits anymore. Maybe my google-fu is a little rusty, but I can't find anyone who sells them.

Any suggestions? Should I hold out until the end of summer for prices to come down and hope that these kits become more available, or bite the bullet and get this Seagate? Or, if you know where I can find a hybrid kit, point me there.

[MKSheppard]

Hold out. SSDs aren't yet there. Give them time to mature and for the prices to drop and capacity to rise. I'd say a good crossover would be reasonably priced 200~ GB drives.

[Seggybop]

Any reason why the standard setup of a relatively small SSD (~40gb) for programs along with a cheap 1TB+ for bulk storage would be inadequate?

[Braedley]

My installed steam games measure over 100GB 128GB. Right now, 128GB SSDs aren't affordable for me, but a 32 GB drive in a hybrid kit comes in just under the line, and gives me options down the road.

[Seggybop]

That's what the large conventional drive is for. The 'kits' where you add your own drives are basically doing the same thing, theoretically slightly more conveniently.

The seagate hybrid drives are really meant for laptops where it's not feasible to have multiple drives. It's using the flash memory to store your most often accessed data, but it'll drop to normal mechanical speed any time it has to access anything outside that 4gb.

[General Zod]

Wouldn't more ram be a better option for load times than an SSD?

[Braedley]

The problem is that the conventional drive is slowing down my load times (by 1.5x-2x). By making it a hybrid with a kit, I basically solve that problem (or at least greatly reduce it's effects).

Also, I'm not sure you understand the purpose of hybrid drives. The purpose of the SSD is basically to serve as an L3 or L4 cache, not permanent storage. The flash storage is filled based on previous reads/writes and likely next reads.

[Braedley]

Wouldn't more ram be a better option for load times than an SSD?

I already have 6GB of ram. The problem lies with the fact that the drive is SATA1 instead of SATA2, but I'm not ready to out right replace it as there's still life left in it.

[Seggybop]

The problem is that the conventional drive is slowing down my load times (by 1.5x-2x). By making it a hybrid with a kit, I basically solve that problem (or at least greatly reduce it's effects).

Not really. As soon as you need something outside the meager 4gb, everything's on hold as the mechanical drive has to spin up and seek. Your most commonly repeated tasks like Windows startup will be entirely precached and will proceed almost as fast as with an SSD, but situations where large quantities of data needs to be loaded quickly (games are a perfect example) will see far less benefit. There simply isn't enough flash memory to help with that use case.

Does that answer your original question? "is 4gb enough for load-heavy games?" it's not; they're basically one of the worst scenarios for this.

Check some sites like anandtech if this is excessively confusing =/

[phongn]

I already have 6GB of ram. The problem lies with the fact that the drive is SATA1 instead of SATA2, but I'm not ready to out right replace it as there's still life left in it.

How does a hard drive's interface make any difference given that (consumer) mechanical drives are hard pressed to exceed 1.5Gb/sec?

The problem is that the conventional drive is slowing down my load times (by 1.5x-2x). By making it a hybrid with a kit, I basically solve that problem (or at least greatly reduce it's effects).

Do you know this?

Also, I'm not sure you understand the purpose of hybrid drives. The purpose of the SSD is basically to serve as an L3 or L4 cache, not permanent storage. The flash storage is filled based on previous reads/writes and likely next reads.

Please do not say things like "the SSD is acting like an L3 or L4 cache".

[Uraniun235]

Rather than half-ass it, why not save your money for a few more months so that you can afford enough SSD storage?

Also, do you actually use all 128GB of those games? Maybe you could uninstall some of them and reinstall them later.

[Chris OFarrell]

I was able to get a 75Gb SSD (an Intel X-25M) on special and just use it for the OS and core programs, it really makes a huge difference to windows boot and response times.

Most of my various apps are on a pair of 1TB Seagates.

Of course, I also have 8 Gigs of Ram so I have the pagefile disabled, so that isn't taking up space either. You just have to be careful with what you allow on the drive, I've still got over 50% free.

[Stark]

Even with 8gb ram the precaching is still useful.

Anyway if you do what U said, you can install your games/etc then just move the install to a regular drive and move it back when you want to use it. you don't need to install because the keys are all in place.

[phongn]

Of course, I also have 8 Gigs of Ram so I have the pagefile disabled, so that isn't taking up space either. You just have to be careful with what you allow on the drive, I've still got over 50% free.

That is a terribly bad idea.

[JointStrikeFighter]

Why? I disable the page on my netbook and it fixed a heap of short hangs it was doing.

[Chris OFarrell]

Of course, I also have 8 Gigs of Ram so I have the pagefile disabled, so that isn't taking up space either. You just have to be careful with what you allow on the drive, I've still got over 50% free.

That is a terribly bad idea.

I have only ever seen blistering performance since doing so, and have never had any indication of a request being denied and causing problems or any caching performance differences, when I tried it originally. Not on either Vista or 7. And I've put a LOT of different programs on.

[phongn]

I have only ever seen blistering performance since doing so, and have never had any indication of a request being denied and causing problems or any caching performance differences, when I tried it originally. Not on either Vista or 7. And I've put a LOT of different programs on.

Without a pagefile writing a crashdump becomes impossible, for one. Two, I will simply quote Mark Russinovich (one of the foremost experts on Windows' architecture) below:

So how do you know how much commit charge your workloads require? You might have noticed in the screenshots that Windows tracks that number and Process Explorer shows it: Peak Commit Charge. To optimally size your paging file you should start all the applications you run at the same time, load typical data sets, and then note the commit charge peak (or look at this value after a period of time where you know maximum load was attained). Set the paging file minimum to be that value minus the amount of RAM in your system (if the value is negative, pick a minimum size to permit the kind of crash dump you are configured for). If you want to have some breathing room for potentially large commit demands, set the maximum to double that number.

Some feel having no paging file results in better performance, but in general, having a paging file means Windows can write pages on the modified list (which represent pages that aren’t being accessed actively but have not been saved to disk) out to the paging file, thus making that memory available for more useful purposes (processes or file cache). So while there may be some workloads that perform better with no paging file, in general having one will mean more usable memory being available to the system (never mind that Windows won’t be able to write kernel crash dumps without a paging file sized large enough to hold them).

In short: you can set a low minimum so you can write a crashdump - and then let Windows grow as needed. If your SSD space is too precious, you can always allocate the majority of your pagefile space on slower spinning media.

Why? I disable the page on my netbook and it fixed a heap of short hangs it was doing.

Do you have one of those cheap netbook SSDs that have abysmal random IO performance?