I was reading yesterday's Jeff Atwood blog post on Revisiting SSD and I first heard about hybrid hard drives: a HD that has a small SSD portion (let's say 4GB) and the rest is a regular spinning hard drive (let's say 500GB). So, it's greater performance without all the high (for now) cost of a FULL SSD hard drive.
So, my question is:
Who decides what goes into the SSD portion? Is it done by software (OS)? Is it done by hardware/firmware inside the disk?
Best Answer
With those specs, let's say you're talking about the Seagate Momentus XT. AnandTech has an informative review of the drive. Excerpt:
For a real world example, I just upgraded to this drive recently on my MacBook and can attest that the OS and my main applications load up much faster.