Is the time finally right for hybrid hard drives?

a_hanso writes: Hard drives that combine a traditional spinning platter for mass storage and solid state flash memory for frequently accessed data, have always made sense. They may be slower than SSDs, but they are a lot cheaper gigabyte-for-gigabyte. CNET's Harry McCracken speculates on how soon such drives may become mainstream.

Um... yes and no.

[Jane Q. Public]

Yes, they are finally starting to get to the point they make sense. No, they have NOT "always" made sense.

You are trading performance for reliability. By putting the least use-tolerant component (the SSD) in the most-frequently-used position, you are aggravating the weak reliability issue.

Sure, that makes sense from a performance standpoint. But it is only just now that reliability (i.e., number of reliable write-cycles) is getting up to the point where they are even acceptable in that role, in a heav