There are mass storage drives that consist of a large HDD and a smaller part of flash memory. From the computer's point of view they act just as a normal hard drive, but internally the disk internally moves frequently used portions to the SSD part for performance increase. An example for this type of drive is the Seagate Laptop SSHD ST1000LM014.
Are there any reported performance increases compared to a pure hard drive when using Ubuntu (or any Linux distribution for that matter) or does the internal software of the drive rely on NTFS file system features? Since there are no additional drivers needed I do not expect software problems, but I could not find any reports of how this works. And googling for SSHD and Linux leads to no relevant results for obvious reasons.
PS: I hope you do not read this as a shopping recommendation. I am not looking for a specific product, but want to know whether drives with this concept are useful for Ubuntu systems?