I recently purchased a Seagate 2TB Desktop SSHD SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Bare Drive (ST2000DX001) for $90 on Amazon and plan to use it as my main Windows 8 drive. What I'm wondering is if installing a new copy of windows on it is better than doing a image copy of my system. The reason I ask is because I've read that hybrid drives 'learn' your habits. Any thoughts? Or am I overthinking it's abilities.
-Mike

Hybrid drives track the most used sector blocks and keep those on the SSD portion. So whether you image or do a fresh install, it'll still be starting off with nothing on the SSD. If you do image, just be sure that you properly align to the 4K sector size.

Windows 7+ normally already is, but not always.

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Thanks for the info.
On another note, do you know anything about the windows 8.1 media installation software from the microsoft site? I burned a DVD and wrote to a thumb drive of the software and after the install, I realized that it never asked me for the key. Does it do this later down the road?