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Inspiron 17R 7720 mSATA question
My Inspiron 17R 7720 has a 32GB mSATA SSD. I had thought, apparently incorrectly, that this drive was a boot drive containing the OS and was used to provide a faster OS startup. In response to another thread I posted a responder stated my mSATA drive was a cache and did not contain any programs. So does that mean that there is no data permanently stored on the mSATA drive? When the system is powered off, all the data on the mSATA is lost? If so what is the purpose of larger mSATA drives? I see them upwards of 128GB, what would a larger mSATA drive do that my 32GB drive won't?
ejn63
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October 26th, 2016 14:00
The 32G drive caches the main drive - there IS data stored on it, and the more frequently data is accessed, the more of it is stored on the 32G drive. It's a COPY of the data from the hard drive, though - this is NOT a RAID 0 array.
While an mSATA cache drive (or a hybrid drive) will speed up the fetch from the hard drive somewhat, it is a pale imitation of the performance you get when you actually install and run the operating system completely FROM a native solid state drive. Doing that will vastly improve the overall system performacne vs running a cached, hybrid or conventional hard drive.
houdel
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October 27th, 2016 21:00
I was confused at first about your mention of hybrid drives. The I looked more closely at the description of the $80 Amazon "SSD"s. They title it as a solid state drive, but carefully hidden in the fine print they disclose they are really hybrid drives. After considerable searching I found a 1TB native SD for IIRC $377. My computer performs pretty well as is, I don't need to spend that amount of money for what would be to me a very nominal performance increase.
A question though - you imply the performance gain of the hybrid drive would not be great. Yet, where data is provided, the 2.5" 1TB HDDs claim 3GB/s performance while the 2.5" 1TB hybrid drives claim 6GB/s performance. Does not that throughput translate to a comparable performance improvement?