SSHDs

My Lenovo E335 is maddeningly slow at bootup, though OK once everything is up and running. Just opening Firefox or Thunderbird the first time can take best part of a minute in Win 7 though rather better in Win 8. At present it has a 512GB HDD with both Win 7 and Win 8.1 installed sharing a data partition. I'd like to speed it up but don't like the price of 512GB SSDs so was wondering whether a 2½" hybrid SSHD, at a fraction of the SSD cost, might be a worthwhile investment.

I know that with SSHDs the SSD bit is just a cache and that you can't decide yourself where your data is to be stored. So if I installed such a drive would it accept an image of my present drive I wonder and dual boot OK? Anyone got any relevant experience?

 

Thanks David. It's a three-way compromise between speed, disk capacity and cost. I've been reading dozens of reviews by folk who have bought SSHD and for me I think it's going to be the best choice. For about £60 I can maintain my 512GB and get a decent speed increase, especially at bootup. An equivalent SSD would cost nearly three times as much. My main PC has an SSD and a fast spinner so I know how they perform and I'll let you know in due course how I rate the SSHD. Just have to take the plate off the Lenovo and find out whether I have a 7 or 9.5mm drive.

 

Do you have Fast Boot enabled? The time for my 8.1 laptop to get to the desktop after pushing the power button is around 10-12 seconds.

 

Yes, fast boot is enabled but the E335 is no fireball. For 8.1 time to desktop using a Microsoft account, which requires an internet connection, is just over one and a half minutes. For the original Win 7, using a local account and which still has some of the Lenovo utilities enabled, it's about 2 minutes. 12 seconds is ridiculous. My i5 Win 7 PC with SSD takes about 30 seconds and I regard anything in the 30 - 45 seconds range as perfectly acceptable.

 

Can I ask you to clarify exactly what you mean by that please? Win 7 does have something called Fastboot enabled at startup, see pic, but I was just having a quick read of a fastboot thread on the Lenovo forums and it sounds like something different. 8.1 doesn't have it as that was a clean install I did later.

 

I'm not sure what the Lenovo fastboot thing is, but 8/8.1 does have fastboot. It is buried (and on by default).

Im on OS X right now but once this upload finishes I shall boot into 8.1 and find it for ya.

 

Thanks for that and yes, it's on.

 

In that case, I would look into an SSHD too.

 

Seems the 9.5mm deep drives are all 1TB now (2 platters) so I'm gonna get double disk capacity, want it or not. I have seen comments that for SSHD to work to its best it really needs a fresh install, or installs in my case. Hope not, life is quite short enough! :eek

 

Run into an unexpected problem setting up this SSHD. I had created an Acronis image of the outgoing drive and stored it on a bootable external drive expecting it to be a simple restore job after fitting the new drive. However the Acronis rescue media does not see the new drive although BIOS does. One option is to get an external 2½" USB caddy and just clone the old drive but if Acronis can't see it in the SATA bay it probably won't see it in USB either.

Any thoughts on this you hardware experts, or other suggestions as to how I might get around this?

 

Looks like this is solved. I had bought Paragon Disk Manager a while ago but never used it. It has an imaging capability and also, like Acronis, can filter out unwanted files in the backup, a feature I needed and which the free imaging programs like Macrium Reflect do not have. I created a new image of the outgoing drive, fitted the new drive, and bingo! it's currently restoring it to the SSHD. So finally, hopefully, I can start finding out just how good or otherwise these SSHDs actually are.

 

Initially I was rather disappointed with the SSHD, but after about 10 days of use it is now noticeably faster than the original drive, even though the original was 7200rpm and the SSHD is 5400 rpm. Seems it takes a while for the software to understand how you use your computer and which files to cache in the SSD part of the drive. After a few days I had thought of reinstating the original 500GB drive and using the 1TB SSHD in a caddy for storage, but I won't now be doing that. Overall, worthwhile, but don't expect fireworks.

 

Good to know info. Thanks for the testing and the post!