need laptop storage opinions

I'm planning to replace my dv6t 1300CTO laptop in a year or so, and am doing a little advance scouting for the features I want. My question regards the drive type.

I would like an ssd, 256gb most likely. However I'd like your thoughts on hybrid drives and hard drives utilizing an ssd cache. What limitations do the ssd's present at this time? What about its life span or other concerns that i should consider.

Thanks

 

The lifespan of SSDs primarily depends on how often you write to them. In a year, SSDs will further reduce in price and then the only reason to get hybrid drives over them is if you are on a very tight budget and after all the components have been added to your laptop, you do not have enough left to consider a SSD. Some times in this scenario, you can downgrade a component and make room for the SSD instead.

However, I don't think the drive should be your primary concern and one year is way too long a time to be asking these questions. Technology changes a lot in a year and while SSDs have become a lot more popular in the last two years, they may not change much other than in price in the next year.

That being said, you should really be thinking of other components, like the CPU and GPU and that too a few months before purchase, not this far in advance.

 

Agreed with maverick1989; at this time scale, CPU and GPU will be the major components you should consider now: Should you buy now and get an IB CPU and current nVidia/AMD GPU, or wait until Haswell comes out (and whatever nVidia/AMD are planning for GPUs)? I also would not neglect the display as well; what good is a "high-end" laptop if you get it with a 1366*768 display?

As for SSDs themselves, the only limit to SSDs are the price/GB, which is sitting roughly around $0.70/GB last time I checked. It's only going to go down, though. Hybrid drives are okay, but they only really work if your computing behavior is very, very predictable (you always open two Firefox windows, Excel, and Photoshop, for example). If your computing behavior is "random" enough, the hybrid HDD is pointless, as most stuff is still limited by the speed of the 5400RPM magnetic platter. I'd only consider one if my laptop had only one option for storage. Realistically, you can replace just about any optical drive with a HDD/SDD bay, and more and more laptops are coming with mSATA options these days.

 

Thanks guys, and yes i agree with you both in that I am planning way too far in advance, seeing that tech changes very quickly in this game. Prices on ssd's i expect to be more affordable next year, so without question this is the way I want to proceed.
To further explain, I've been going online configuring laptops as if I were making the purchase sooner rather than later as just an exercise in fun more than anything else.

 

If you are going for SSD, it is important to consider a few things.

1. Price per Gb, some people would prefer performance but I consider this to be paramount, lack of quantity is very noticeable compared to lack of speed

2. Controller, Sandforce, Marvell, Samsung or LSI, pick one that best suits your data type. I'm not a fan of Sandforce since I find their garbage collection to be somewhat unreliable as the drive completely fills up, I also find that they are hell fast when fresh but they tend to settle to a steady state as you use them. Marvell performs very well across a wide range of data loads but tend to be slightly more power hungry and the drives in question tend to be pricier than Sandforce (with the exception of the Plextor M5S) I would recommend this. Samsung controller is also rock solid, very very reliable, fast and excellent aggressive garbage collection, only issue is you have only Samsung drives to choose from so its not possible to choose cheaper alternatives. LSI is the new kid on the block with the Corsair Neutron drives, it seems to be in the same ballpark as Samsung and Marvell but my issue with it is that its still unproven, the other controllers have been on the market for years and their bugs are very public.

3. Capacity, I find 120gb to be sufficient for office usage and general use, its very tight if you want to store games though since most modern titles take about 10-20gb (20gb is for Shogun 2 which is my personal favourite ). 256gb i think is the sweet spot since it gives plenty of breathing space for games, plus the SSD will be running at full speed for most controllers as most of the channels are full at this capacity. 480gb+ is when the channels are usually full and the manufacturers start doubling up flash cell density or ganging double cells per channel. Ganging will result in slightly slower performance than increasing density but I don't think this is done much anymore.

4. Manufacturer Reputation, this is very important as firmware updates are critical to the success of any SSD, there are many bugs that often slip past validation so speedy support is a big plus.