I've been thinking about putting a 1TB hybrid drive into my laptop to help speed things up and give myself a little bit more storage, but I don't know how reliable they are compared to regular drives. Can anyone shed some light on this? Any personal experiences or recommendations? Thanks!
Depending on what you run, how often you run it, and how full your drive is. It can be close to an SSD in performance, though more then 90% of the time you will find it will be just a hair faster then a hard drive.
The reliability isn't much of an issue. They should be about as reliable as a standard HDD, perhaps with a small amount more liability due to the cache - but that's unlikely.
However, the speed increase you'll get is likely to be marginal and if you can go for an SSD then that's the better choice. If the issue is that the SSDs with enough storage for you are way too much money, then you could consider getting a smaller SSD and simply using an external HDD for your peripheral files like movies and music.
SSDs at around 500GB are now very affordable, depending on the brand you select, with 250GB options often being available for what you could rightly call "cheap".....they're worth a look.
Another reason to favor a pure SSD option is getting away from the susceptibility of mechanical drives to incurr damage from relatively mild handling while the system is operating, and in a smaller way also improving power consumption. On a smaller 11" laptop I even got a lower noise level simply because the SSD made a lot less heat by itself.
I have 2 750 GBs by Seagate in a RAID 0 array and my boot times are near SSD performance. I will tell you this though, the hybrids are a very nice drive if you want the speed of an SSD and the sturdiness of an HDD. I've been rock solid on these things for I'd say 2 1/2 to maybe 3 years now. They are my go to for the middle performance. I know some editors that really hate the drives with a passion and it makes me scratch my head because here I am booting Windows 7 in about 35 seconds from hitting the power switch to the desktop