Now conventional wisdom suggests an SSD for the operating system and sim of choice whilst a 7200 rpm (or better) 3.5" HDD for the data. 

 

Why then do I enquire about Seagate's third generation hybrid drives which, wait for it, feature a 2.5" 5400 rpm form factor in capacities of 500 Gb or 1Terra, utilising 8 Gb of Nand. And this is promoted as being designed for Laptop use.

 

Well it's cheaper than the combination above, for one. It's faster than HDD's at booting into Windoze and FS9, my sim of choice. Being one, small, item it is easier to fit into and keep cool in desktop case and less obstructive to airflow  

 

For the life of me I can't really see a downside to this solution except the old argument/justification "mine's bigger than yours." I will be running water-cooled, mildly o/c, Haswell much more than enough for FSX let alone good 'ol FS9.

 

Any comment, good or bad, would be appreciated.   :help:

I have not heard good reviews pertaining to Seagate's hybrid drives.  While they sound great in theory, the performance reviews show otherwise.  As I see that the costs of SSDs are getting lower, why not spring for one of those and be done with it?  I run fsx on my Alienware laptop and have a Samsung 256 SSD internally and an old Kingston 128gb SSD externally that I run fsx off of.  believe it or not, fsx runs just fine.  I am a firm believer that your setting and tweaks are what really drives the performance of your hardware and having a fast processor, a decent amount of memory and a good graphics card can get you right where you need to be to run fsx.  This is all conjectural opinion of course.

3 years now with my Seagate Momentus X Hybrid 500 Gb HDD on an Asus notebook with FSX installed at default location, no problems whatsoever. You will see faster boot of your OS and FSX after a few times, when the cache is loaded.