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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?

2 Answers 2

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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.

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  • The SSD doesn't show up as a separate filesystem, I mean in both windows and ubuntu I can't use/see the SSD drive. The Disk Utility tool shows two separate disks: 320 GB Hard Disk - ATA ST320LT007-9ZV142 and 16 GB Solid-State Disk - ATA SanDisk SSD U10016 GB
    – moriesta
    Sep 20, 2012 at 17:27
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    If there's a utility that shows the SSD as a block device, it's not transparent. You can either use the SSD to accelerate windows (using Lenovo's oem driver which may already be installed) or Linux (using bcache)
    – Gabriel
    Sep 14, 2013 at 9:31
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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

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