Hybrid drives are an interesting proposal, billed as the perfect blend of low cost space (HDD) and high speed cache (SSD), but the reality isn't as interesting.

The drive is 500gb, which is modest by today's standards but plentiful for a laptop drive. You only get 4gb of SSD cache, which is constantly being filled with your most used files and programs- in theory this means that your most used files will open quicker, and it would work if you used the same programs again and again, but for my usage pattern where i'm using lots of different programs it never gets to learn what I really need to be committed to SSD- and you have no way of controlling the space manually.

Despite this it's actually a very speedy drive, being 7200rpm rather than 5400rpm and having a hghly dense platter.

I have had zero issues with this drive, and it runs much quieter than my old drive, faster, and has twice the storage. The drive occasionally 'chirps', although this sounds bad it's actually nothing to worry about, and I think it might be isolated to the older macbook pro that I use the drive in.

Don't expect SSD like speed, but worth considering over a standard 500gb drive if you don't want to go for an SSD. Recommended