I've bought a Lenovo Thinkpad Edge laptop which has a hybrid 320GB HDD + 16GB SSD, then I've installed Ubuntu 12.04, so now I have dual boot - Ubuntu/Windows7.
Everything is fine but the question is - will the Ubuntu use the 16GB SSD drive?
I mean will it take the advantage of it?
As far as I know Windows uses it like a cache while waking up from sleep/hibernation, doesn't it?
If your SSD shows up as a separate 16 gigabyte drive I don't think so.
I came across some forum posts talking about Lenovo hybrid disks. It seems to be a Hybrid drive in some sense yes.
But it seems to require software in the running operating system.
"Real" hybrid drives transparently move files to the SSD part of the drive to "boost" performance. and present themselves as a single drive to the operating system.
Since they check blocks being read / written often and move those blocks to the SSD part of the drive they are filesystem agnostic and work on any or multiple operating systems.
Llimited space of the SSD part and the algorithm is constantly trying to optimize for the current running OS. Switching between operating systems often will lower the performance gain. The longer you stay on the same OS the bigger the optimization gain of the hybrid will be for that particular OS.
yes absolutely ubuntu will use this SSD
The hard drive will manage the split between ssd and magnetic storage itself
All new hybrid drives are self-managed
The Momentus XT drive installs as easily as a traditional 9.5mm-high notebook drive for new systems or laptop upgrades and, unlike early hybrid drives, operates independently of the operating system and the motherboard chipset.
check this link for instance