SSDs are becoming faster and more reliable, so I would definitely lean toward that for an OS/Program drive. They do degrade over time, so depending on how old yours is (and its usage) you may be seeing that effect.
 
As far as the hybrid drives, I called Seagate a couple years ago to ask about them. I did not get the feel that the gain from the small SS portion outweighed the potential risk of that portion going bad over time. At that time it seemed more of a novelty item than a business pursuit, and as you alluded to... 8Gb is not much.
 
For your situation, I would lean toward drives for their intended purpose. An SSD delivers speed and provides enough memory to be useful in the workhorse capacity, but does not have the proven legs to trust with important data (IMO). HDDs have larger capacity, decent speeds, and are more reliable to trust with data (and are cheaper for capacity).

bentleyousley

cparmerlee
...it could be a good strategy to use one of the Seagate drives for the OS and program files...

Which is exactly how I have my drives set up: OS on the Hybrid...

 
2TB seems like overkill for a system drive in a multi-drive setup.  I would have thought that a smallish-capacity SSD would be preferable to a large hybrid in this case.

Kev999

bentleyousley

cparmerlee
...it could be a good strategy to use one of the Seagate drives for the OS and program files...

Which is exactly how I have my drives set up: OS on the Hybrid...

 
2TB seems like overkill for a system drive in a multi-drive setup.  I would have thought that a smallish-capacity SSD would be preferable to a large hybrid in this case.

I'm using 750 GB Hybrid drives. MicroCenter was blowing-them-out dead-cheap about a year ago. I picked up a couple out of curiosity. I cloned my OS drive and booted to the hybrid. The first few boots were nothing spectacular but after it had learned the pattern of usage, the boot time dropped significantly. I can't help but wonder if the reviewer ran the hybrid long enough to really judge it's capibilities.