Save some pennies and get a standard 2TB drive.

Any point in getting this as a storage drive for a laptop that already has an NVME SSD as the main storage? Or should I just get a standard non-hybrid 2.5" HDD for the laptop?

Save some pennies and get a standard 2TB drive.

Depends on what games you play surely ? In Battlefield those extra few seconds could mean the difference between getting a vehicle or not at the beginning of each round.

For the uninitiated...this is a hybrid drive which is mainly a normal HDD but has a small amount of SSD in it...it learns what you access most frequently and puts that into the SSD portion for the speed benefits...I had one of the really really early versions of these (750 GB)...seemed OK. Curiosity even over rode my anti Seagate principles (previous bad experiences). Professional online reviews showed how it took a few read cycles to get windows into the SSD portion and get full benefits from it. My early version one is still going strong but has found its way into a portable enclosure now and has infrequent use.
So id cautiously recommend this for a Windows machine if you mainly want to speed up boot up times and save some cash over buying a full blown SSD.
Hope this someone.

It don't work like that, all players start at the same time and it dos not matter if your ps4 is loading the game from slow hdd in a minute or from fast ssd in few seconds, all players are forced by server to wait for match to begin, if you have problems with time lags and slowdowns that's your broadband failing you not slow hard drive.

Incidentally, for the anti Seagate league (I m a member)..I bought a portable 4TB Maxtor drive which turns out it contains a Seagate drive! (imagine my horror)...well I've had it over a week now and it's still going strong...so maybe they've turned a corner.

Ulti No, there is no point in getting this as a secondary drive, it might speed up some regularly loaded apps IF they are stored on this drive... but not worth the premium over std hdd as a storage drive, IMO.
(If they upped the ssd portion to 128gb+ it might be a different proposition)

Oh I'd settled on WD...usually get those. My 4TB Maxtor (I mean Seagate is) just to back up my WD NAS so it's expendable....ish. What's HGST?

HGST was Hitachi before they were bought out by Western Digital, pretty reliable drives.

I thought that was a "per server" setting that makes everyone wait for a countdown, and so wasn't on every server ? Must admit it's been a while since I played either 4 or 1 so I'm probably just out of touch.

I used one of these as a main drive for a budget home build. I'm very impressed with the performace; a near ssd like experience.

Right let's settle this argument. I own the 1tb version of this hard drive and can confirm that the loading times are quicker for me than it is for my friends with the regular hard drives. I always get the tanks / helicopters on BF first, I load Fifa a lot quicker and GTA (most important one) So for all you haters saying it doesn't benefit you by buying this hard drive, they are talking dribble and are uneducated morons. It is literally only around 20 secs quicker but that time does make a difference so please quit the moaning on the HDD as it is quicker, I did a lot of research before committing and this HDD was the best on the reviews. I have just ordered the 2TB version because of how good it is!

He is talking about the PS4.

Watch the digital foundary review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hftHjOvcUtc

PS4 pal

I have one and your wrong, you know why these drives only have 8GB of NAND, because games only load a max of 8GB into RAM, Xbox, PC, PS4. Even a single load will see a significant amount of data moved to NAND so the second load sees a speed improvement, 3 or 4 loads and your at SSD speeds. Most people tend to play the same game consecutively.

Taking any drive apart will void the warranty, where these have 5 years, and who wants a 2GB outside when it could go inside, whole point of USB is you can go large.


Yeah this sucked, I have a Touro Pro manufactured by HGST cheesed me off when I went to buy another one.

Seems I'm a bit too late to the party. It has now gone up by a fiver after I decided I wanted to go for it. Not sure if I should just buy it at Amazon now for the same price as it currently is at box (£85) or wait and see if it goes back down to £80 on box.

What sold me on this was this thread: https://superuser.com/questions/890160/using-a-hybrid-hard-drive-for-storage-only-not-as-a-system-drive-does-the-cache

I'm not much of a gamer but I have started to dabble with video editing in 4k. The size of 4k files are pretty big so having them on my SSD is not really an option. As this drive isn't much more than a standard 2TB I would rather get this for the possible improvements in speed that it might provide me as it does take me several days of editing for 1 video so that means reopening the same files several times for a few days.

One thing I want to know is how loud these drives are. I used to have HDDs back in the day but after having less time at home and having a higher income, I bought a 1TB SSD for my machine as I decided I don't download/store as many things now and preferred the silence of a SSD. Things have now changed though as I have mentioned; I have been doing some 4k video editing with a bitrate of 100Mbps which is roughly 45GB per hour so my SSD will fill up way too quickly.

Just the usual slight whoosh sound of a hard drive. Not particularly clicky when seeking either.

back up in price now.

Your only see speed improvements if the files are 8GB or less in size, like I said above it only has 8GB of NAND

PS4 as the subject is PS4 related? and for all the haters....this item is banana's!!! I will see you in my tank - 30 seconds quicker!!!!