Speed Up Mac with a hybrid drive | Hybrid drive Vs SSD Vs HDD

An SSD is considered as the king of the storage world. The SSD drives use flash memory and have nothing to do with any moving disks heads etc.. An SSD offers an incredible advantage over HDD and makes a huge improvement in your Mac performance.

Unfortunately, they’re also size-restricted and are still very expensive to afford. You can save some money by giving up some capacity.But, what if you don't want to fork over that kind of money, or if you’re not willing to compromise for the speed offered by an SSD?

Alternatives to increase Mac speed without compromising
The new Seagate’s Momentus XT “hybrid” hard drive seems the best solution to this issue. It combines a relatively-small 4GB SSD with a standard 500GB hard drive. From a user’s perspective, the SSD is hidden and it appears appears as a standard 500GB hard drive. The user can't access the SSD.

It is important to note that the drive’s firmware manages the SSD. It identifies the most commonly used disk sectors (not files) and move those bits to the SSD. The user can't notice the management or any change in drive's behaviour except an increased speed.

The hybrid drive makes and brings you the best of both - an SSD speed at HDD cost.
To analyze the performance of this drive in the real world we installed the drive in MacBook Pro and Mac mini. The result we noticed is as follows:

Seagate Momentus XT scores

	Photoshop CS5	HandBrake 0.9.4	CineBench R11.5 Graphics	CineBench R11.5 CPU	Mathematica- Mark 7	Parallels WorldBench Multitask test	Multitasking
15" MacBook Pro 2.66GHz Core i7 500GB 5400-rpm hard drive	58	422	16	160	5.8	361	77
15" MacBook Pro 2.66GHz Core i7 500GB Seagate Momentus XT	59	422	16	161	5.8	360	76