I have a 2009 HP Compaq Presario CQ70 laptop whose Samsung HD has failed. Prior to failure I had partitioned the HD to dual boot Win Vista (original OS) & Linux Lite (in readiness for a disc change). The PC has the max possible RAM of 3Gb.

I have purchased a Seagate FireCuda ST1000LX015 - hybrid hard drive - 1 TB - SATA 6Gb/s in the hope to offset the RAM limitation.

Prior to installing I have performed some research & checking leading me to contact Seagate to try to determine if they foresaw any problems with my intended use (thinking largely about disc defrag/trimming mixed on a hybrid drive.

Seagate informed me that none of their drives are guaranteed to work with Linux and that there was a potential risk of damaging the SS element of the disc.

My preferred installation is to use Linux Lite as the host system with Win XP running in VirtualBox (I need Win XP to run my Borland Paradox Database - MS did not properly integrate Paradox into Vista).

Finally my question !!

Does anybody have direct experience of running this particular hard drive problem free using a Ubuntu based Linux as primary OS (preferably Lite)? (I have noted the post of 02-24-17 "Anyone using a FireCuba.." where problems were being encountered).

If so, are their any particularities that I need to be aware of?

No.
Compaq is the problem, in my experience.

Given you've already purchased the FireCuda, and the age of the referenced thread, I'd make the assumption that in the intervening period the kernel and driver developers have implemented appropriate changes such that you can have confidence to proceed with normal use, which includes backups, and testing that the backups can be successfully restored. Your choice of distro should matter not, as long as it's relatively current.

mrmazda,
Your view is in line with mine, hence my post. However, without a confirmation from somebody already using this drive I will not proceed based on hope but will, pro tem, use the hybrid drive but install only Vista (with XP running in virtualBox). I will then reflect on buying a different HD to try my experiment or wait until I finally replace the laptop, then start with a more powerful version of Linux, such as Mint (still with Virtualbox & Windows version ? for my database).

IMO, you cut the field of potential responders several orders of magnitude by targeting a specific distro in your subject. HD support is agnostic across distros.

BTW, I'm still using Paradox and Quattro Pro.

I did find this review
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...hd_linux&num=1

As the review states in self host mode it looks like a regular drive to the OS. I think I found the referenced thread and difficult to know if you could blame the problem on the drive.

The SSD just acts like a drive cache and will not compensate for memory. I can run light weight and CLI only distributions on a laptop via VirtualBox with a laptop on 4 GB memory. XP with 512MB might run ok

I also still run Paradox... I use FreeDOS with VirtualBox using the mTCP network stack. I still have a file manager program similar to Norton Comamder and wrote a simple virtual printer script.