w530 with hybrid drive

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ravloony · Post by **ravloony** » Tue Feb 26, 2013 8:04 pm

I just bought a Lenovo W530, and I mean to install gentoo on it as a dual boot with the preinstalled Windows 7 Pro.

It has according to the spec a hybrid drive of 500GB capacity.

Under Windows 7(preinstalled), the 500GB one shows up in My Computer and the SSD is use to speed things up I think and only shows in Hardware Manager.

Both hard disks show up in Hardware manager and fdisk -l as seperate entities, a hgst hts725050A7E630 500GB HDD and a samsung MZMPC032HBCD-00 32GB SSD.

My question is: how should I deal with this under gentoo? Ideally, I'd like to use the SSD partitioned into 2 and stick gentoo and Windows system partitions on it, but I'm not sure I'll even get access to it as an SSD, or if Windows won't decide to erase all the data and use it as a cache.

What are my options for this hardware?

eccerr0r · Post by **eccerr0r** » Tue Feb 26, 2013 10:16 pm

I have an Ultrabook (HP Envy4) with the "Intel Smart Response" caching system (Check your windows menus, you should find it somewhere...), and from the factory it's configured to look like one hard drive. However this is software based (partially BIOS) and apparently Windows only when I checked... I ended up disabling the cache and then simply not use the SSD. Technically I could just use that SSD as another disk but I don't...

It wasn't as big a deal because I tossed the 500G disk and put a 128G SSD in its place. I had to reformat anyway.