Second HD to Laptop with 128GB SSD: HDD or Hybrid

I have a Dell Latitude E6430 with a 128GB SSD and an optical drive.
The windows installation and some other installations ate most of my space and I'm trying to decide what to do next.
Are there any gains to buying a hybrid hd as the second one or can I just buy a regular solid hdd?

Ittai

Posted 2014-09-07T15:08:15.160

Reputation: 187

1This is always debatable. It depends on how much you are willing to spend and what your requirements are. Purely opinion based. I wouldn't flag this question because you already gave your bounty – Prasanna – 2014-09-09T18:45:11.517

I took the liberty of removing your request for specific recommendations, as that is off-topic here at superuser. – ChrisInEdmonton – 2014-09-09T18:48:05.160

Answers

Are there any gains to buying a hybrid drive as the second one or can I just buy a regular hdd?

If you regularly open the same programs or files from the new drive then an hybrid will help (it will cache those, thus speeding up reading those files).

If you just store movies and music on it and do not consistently play the same song then no. In that case it will not help at all.

Also are there specific recommendations to drive models?

That depends on your goal. I got a WD black in a caddy in the (previously) optical bay of my E6500. I bought that based on speed, capacity and price.

Is price and battery life is an issue (or when doing mostly sequential access like playing movies) go for a low RPM green drive.

If price is less of an issue and you think you might access the same programs or games quite often: Go for a Hybryd.

If capacity is not much an issue then consider a second SSD. (240GiB is getting quite affordable).

Hennes

Posted 2014-09-07T15:08:15.160

Reputation: 60 739

Thanks a lot. When you're referring to the WD black hybrid do you mean the Black^2? The one which has 1TB HDD and 120GB SSD? because that sounds like a big one – Ittai – 2014-09-12T15:49:51.477

No, I still have an much older 250GB WD black in my old laptop. I mostly use it to RIP my DVDs to (no noisy computer DVD player) and then play it from disk onto a beamer. For that a green one would have been very nice.I just had a spare black, a spare laptop and a need for a media playing system. When I unplug my laptop from its dock and I know that I will be away from wall power for a longer time I even unplug it and just run from the SSD.

Note that I would have gotton a WD green (or similar other brand drive) and a SSD if I bought them at the same time. In my case I just started with a blck – Hennes – 2014-09-12T16:19:06.617

If I were in your shoes I would:

Add a standard mechanical HDD as your second drive, then
Redirect your user profile data folders (Documents, Music, Movies, Desktop, etc.) to that drive.

Windows and your current (and future) applications would continue to be on your fast SSD drive while your user data (documents, music, etc.) would live on the mechanical drive, freeing up space on your SSD. You won't notice and speed loss moving your user data to the mechanical drive.

This question has an answer explaining how to move your user data folders to another drive.

Now, all this said, if even moving your user data to another drive doesn't leave you with sufficient free space on your existing 128 GB SSD, then I would encourage you to start by replacing your 128 GB SSD with either a larger SSD, or if that's beyond your budget, a Hybrid SSD.

The problems I see with adding a second SSD to your laptop are:

Only storing user data on the second SSD would be wasteful. You'd be hard pressed to notice a performance improvement.
Installing programs (in which case you would benefit from the SSD's performance) on the second SSD would be problematic. It can be done, but it's usually not worth the hassle as some programs might complain they're not in the default C:\ProgramFiles... folder structure

I say Reinstate Monica

Posted 2014-09-07T15:08:15.160

Reputation: 21 477