SSD, hybrid or Velociraptor?

[Peter Korsten]

So... my primary hard disc, a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10, is getting a 
bit long in the tooth. I can have a look at defragmenting, and whilst 
Windows 7 proudly claims that there's 0% fragmentation, the freeware 
tool Defraggler says it's more like 22%. Hmm.

Anyway, after changing the motherboard, CPU, memory and graphics card, 
the slowest part is now the hard disc, and I was wondering what to 
replace it with. At work, my computer (a Core i7 860, double channel, 
2.8 GHz) feels snappy and starts up really quickly; the computer at home 
(a Core i7 960, triple channel, 3.2 GHz) feels much slower. The 
difference is particularly evident when starting up a virtual machine, 
which is a matter of seconds, whereas at home it takes minutes 
(admittedly, from a low power/low performance disc).

The machine at work has a 500 GB Velociraptor and the only thing that is 
mildly concerning is that it does a chkdsk *very* often after being 
rebooted after, say, a week.

The fastest solution would be to get an SSD. However, I play a lot of 
games, and load times there is an issue. Recently, I installed Call of 
Duty: Modern Warfare 3, and it's a whopping 14 GB. Given that games 
regularly come in at 5 GB, a small-size SSD is simply not an option. 250 
MB, the size of the Barracuda, would be the bare minimum.

But then, cost becomes an issue. An SSD easily costs £1 per GB, and 
spending £500 or so on a disc is just too much. A Velociraptor is less 
expensive, but there's the third option: those normal drives with an SSD 
cache.

All things considered, does anybody have some good advice?

- Peter