I figured with Ubuntu 10.10 now out, and me still running 8.10 on my laptop that it was time for an upgrade. I have a tradition of buying a new hard drive to install the new OS onto, so I figured this time I'd try out a Seagate Momentus XT - a hybrid drive with 500GB of "normal" platters and 4GB of solid-state storage that gets automatically updated by the drive with frequently-accessed files.
So far, I've found it to be really good - though there are other factors at play such as a fresh OS install and an ext4 filesystem, but I'm sure the hybrid drive is speeding things up substantially too. Once the laptop gets through the POST, it boots into Ubuntu within a few seconds, and my desktop appears fully-populated almost immediately after logging in, despite having loads of stuff on it...
Has anyone else tried out the Momentus XT? It's a bit more expensive than a regular Momentus 7200RPM drive, but it's a hell of a lot cheaper than a full-blown SSD...
I've been entirely interested by solid state drives but was put off when I heard about them having a limited amount of reads. Is that true?
I'm not sure about reads - I think it's more a limited number of write cycles. Modern operating systems and solid state drives use wear-levelling to even this out across the drive, though, so you don't end up with chunks of your drive dying prematurely. The Momentus XT uses SLC rather than MLC memory, which has a much higher number of write cycles, so it's even less likely to wear out - and it's backed by Seagate's standard 5-year warranty, so they must have plenty of faith in it. Even if the XT's SLC did wear out, you'd basically just be left with a standard hard drive.
I also remember seeing something on Hack a Day along the lines of a "Flash Killer" where they rigged up a system which wrote, read and rewrote a flash chip repeatedly, counting how many cycles it went through - and it exceeded the manufacturer's rating for write cycles by an order of magnitude, if I recall correctly. All up, I wouldn't be terribly worried about solid-state drives wearing out, unless you're constantly writing, erasing and rewriting - before it starts to wear out, you'll probably be wanting to swap it for a much bigger, faster, cheaper solid-state drive anyway...