My MSi GT780DXR gaming laptop came with two 750GB HDD SATA2 in raid0 for a total capacity of 1.5TB. I decided to upgrade these to two 1TB hybrid solid state SSHD (Seagate ST1000LM014) SATA3 running in raid1. I had been using Casper 7.0 cloning software for backup on an external USB3 1.5TB HDD. Casper does incremental updates which might take 10 minutes or a couple of hours depending upon how busy the defrag has been. The beauty of Casper is that the clone is incremental and bootable.
When the SSHD units arrived, I did a final Casper update and shut down the laptop. I pulled the two HDD units and installed the two SSHD units. I booted up on the external Casper clone. I started Casper and cloned the new SSHD units which took all night.
When I first booted up on the SSHD units, the laptop was really struggling with hard drive activity. I booted up again in safe mode and discovered that the system was initializing the two SSHD units which I guessed to mean that it was checking that the two SSHD units were in fact exact copies. This took about 8 hours, but when it was done I booted up again and logged on.
The boot time is not significantly improved, probably because I don't boot often. However, the applications that I frequently start are very much faster. I am overall quite pleased with the improved performance.
Here are the specs for these SSHD units:
64MB RAM cache
8GB solid state cache
1TB hard disk
