Hybrid disk drives

[Yasha Karant]

There are hybrid disk drives that have a "small" SSD flash memory along 
with the regular spinning media, typically to serve as a cache for lower 
latency.  Does anyone have long term experience with these units?  Most 
flash memory is not designed for the long term repeated read/write/erase 
cycles of a primary disk drive -- how are these holding up?  Is the 
flash configuration totally transparent to the Linux file systems and 
formatting operations?

Yasha Karant