Hybrid HDD?

I guess I've been living under a rock as I thought my two choices for hard drives would be a traditiona hard drive or a solid state drive. Now I've seen this hybrid, which sounds like an in-between of the faster speeds of SSD, but more economical of a traditional HDD.

Currently, I find the SSD to be too expensive for the little amount of data provided, but the hybrid drive seems like the way to go.

However, I'm wondering if I do go with a hybrid if I should completely reformat my PC as if I just add it, my traditional HDD will still be my boot drive. I'd figure I'd want my hybrid to be my boot drive.

Is hybrid a good choice for those not wanting the more expensive SSD? I realize a hybrid is not as fast as a SSD and I think I'm okay with that.

Thanks for your help :)

@Cwagmire21:

Hybrid is a bit faster than a HDD but not as big as a gap as getting an SSD, so sometimes with the price difference its better to go all the way to SSD.

Can't you use an SSD as boot and then a HDD as storage?

That's what I do. I have my 256GB SSD as boot and I only put heavy games on there, the rest goes on my 1TB HDD.

SSD's aren't that expensive anyways for what you get.

What about a cache drive? and have you thought about 2 HDD's in RAID 0?

Hybrid drives are quite a bit faster than normal mechanical drives. They get better after repetition too, e.g. progressive game map loading. They are almost the best of both worlds.

See this review: http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/5748/seagate-desktop-2tb-sshd-st2000dx001-review/index9.html

"In every case seen here today, the Seagate Desktop SSHD excels, whether it be a synthetic point and click benchmark like HD Tune or ATTO, or even application traces via PCMark 8, the drive just performs."

Yah, just seems like buying a 256 GB drive is so small. I realize it's mainly for the OS.

No, but I've heard things can get complicated quickly with RAID 0. Just built my own PC for the first time two years ago. Don't want to bite off more than I can chew. :P

Yah, that's why I'm strongly considering it. I realize SSD is still the best for pure speed, but I still think the capacity is still far too small for the price you pay.

If you tried an SSd for 5 minutes all your complaints would vanish. Before people get one they think it's just the maximum read/write speed that goes up. It does, but what's more important is the random read/qritw speed. It is astronomically higher than the normal read/write speed and most of what you do on a pc is this.