Thinking about upgrading my hard drive to a hybrid unit with the built in SSD

[Fumesucker]

I have a Dell Optiplex 755 tower with a 2.66 Ghz quad core and 8GB RAM running Windows 7 Ultimate. The boot times with my current 160GB HD are long enough now that I have a lot of software installed that I avoid shutting down the computer quite a bit, would a hybrid HD help with the boot times?

Here is one of the drives I'm considering.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178339&SortField=0&SummaryType=0&PageSize=10&SelectedRating=-1&VideoOnlyMark=False&IsFeedbackTab=true#scrollFullInfo

[gvstn]

1. That link is to a laptop drive.

Here is a desktop model that appears to need no adapter for installation. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178381&ignorebbr=1&cm_re=ppssHybridHDD-_-22-178-381-_-Product

I'm not personally familiar with hybrid drives so can't give much advice. Sounds like it should boot at least 2x times as fast as a 7200rpm in real world situations. That makes a difference.

My quick glance understanding is that it has 8gb of flash memory. A standard new install on Win7 is 16gb. And yours is probably 30gb by now. So it has to learn which files are accessed most frequently and move them into the flash memory. This is opposed to a full SSD drive that would be able to keep all OS files in flash memory. So it is definitely a compromise.

Do you have an open/empty HDD bay?

[Fumesucker]

3. Thanks for the reply

I dug through my junk box and found another 160 GB HD I didn't know I had so I loaded an image I had taken of my HD when the install was fresh on the HD I had found.

The computer has sped up quite a bit just from swapping hard drives to a fresh install and I'm going to be a lot more selective about what software I load and I'm going to make incremental backups a lot more often as I go.

I read quite some number of reviews on that drive you linked to, it seems that the people who reported good success with it were doing things rather similar to what I do.

I checked and with the clean install my Windows 7 Ultimate uses a little under 2GB of RAM when it's running with no applications loaded, I think 8 GB should suffice to hold those files and what software I run the most often...

Yeah, I do have an open bay for a drive. I have about $175 in the computer right now and really don't want to spend nearly that much on a drive..

[gvstn]

6. Yes, Fresh installs do wonders.

I have gotten very lazy since going to Win7 from XP about doing a fresh install once in a while, because I never seem to have any critical problems. When on XP, I did fresh installs about every six months whether I needed them or not. I tend to let my Win7 computers collect lots of crap because they never crash. My current install is at least 2 years old and has been slowing down in boot up even though I try to keep track of what is running on startup. I just have lots of little settings that I don't have a good backup plan to get them running again in a fresh install and thus put it off.

I'm always leery of combination products because they are not concentrating on doing one thing better than anyone else, but if Newegg customers, whom I consider savvy, see some value in them then I can't discount those opinions.

Last time I was going to build a budget computer, I found one on ebay that had basically all the components I was going to use for about $50 less than it would cost me to buy the parts. It came with an SSD (80gb) rather than a mechanical HDD (would have been about 1TB at the time). So I bought it figuring I could just add a mechanical drive. I like the SSD and it does cut down on boot time and is zippy for starting programs but once it goes from locating the program file on disc then it is a matter of the CPU doing the rest of the work starting the program. I think I will always use an SSD for my OS from here on out but don't think I would buy one just to shave a minute off boot times.

You have a fresh install from image so I would go with that for now. Keep an eye out at Newegg for any deal of the day type thing. You might find a good deal during the Christmas season or CyberMonday on a Hybrid or SSD that is hard to pass up. As far as I can tell from a quick Ebay search SSDs haven't come down that much even in two years, but if you see some one-day special on a 64-120gb SSD for a great price it might be worth grabbing to have one.

[hobbit709]

2. What adds to boot time is everything that wants to load on startup.

Most things don't need to load on startup but do by default-especially all the additional crap that comes with a printer driver, iTunes, IM, etc. Turn off everything that the computer doesn't need to get you to the desktop.
That and cleaning out the TEMP folder will improve speed considerably.

[Fumesucker]

4. Yeah, I put a clean install image on a spare HD and it works considerably faster

I have a tendency to try different software a bit and it doesn't always uninstall cleanly, I need to tighten up my backup habits before I install new software, I forget or get lazy or in a hurry and skip making a backup of my current setup.

It still takes longer than I would like though

[hobbit709]

5. Try Revouninstaller. It's what I use, it even gets rid of ALL the Norton crap

http://www.revouninstaller.com/revo_uninstaller_free_download.html