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I am looking to buy a solid state hybrid drives for its balance between price and performance. I can only have one drive on my laptop. My two main uses will be to run applications and to archive our family photos/videos to DropBox. Although I could purchase a 1 TB 2.5" SSD, I do not want to spend that kind of money. When looking at a SSHD to purchase, what specifications should I be looking at? Some differentiators seem to be SSD drive size and HDD rpm.

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  • If possible, use 2 drives: an SSD and a HDD. Files that don't really benefit from fast random access times (photos, videos, etc) go to the HDD, and the stuff that benefits from fast random access times (OS, C++ header files, etc) goes to the SSD.
    – Peter
    Sep 16, 2014 at 16:18
  • For photos, why would you want an SSD or hybrid? You don't need fast access for that at all...
    – Flimzy
    Sep 16, 2014 at 16:18
  • I don't understand the question. There are only a couple SSHDs on the market, I believe by a single manufacture, and they only differ is storage size.
    – Ramhound
    Sep 16, 2014 at 16:19
  • @Flimzy It is for my laptop and it can only hold on one 2.5" drive.
    – Sun
    Sep 16, 2014 at 16:42
  • @Ramhound I see a few different manufacturers such as Toshiba, Seagate on the River. Perhaps when you were researching SSHD, there was only one manufacturer on the market.
    – Sun
    Sep 16, 2014 at 16:42

3 Answers 3

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The primary characteristics you are interested in are SSD size, RPM, and longevity of the drive.

Higher RPM (usually) means the HDD is faster, but it will (usually) also draw more power. Since all hybrid drives are relatively recent designs, higher RPM will be faster, and it will draw more power, compared to lower RPM hybrid drives.

SSD size determines the size of the cache which directly correlates to the speedup you will encounter. Even a 4 GB cache can show significant effects. Depending on how you use the disk, you may benefit from a larger SSD - read reviews.

Longevity, i.e "how likely is this disk to die on me" is not something that can be specified. You need to do research into which manufacturers have a better track record, and be lucky (sorry, not very helpful).

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  • I read that when a SSD dies, it is impossible to recover. In that respect, maybe HDD is more "reliable"? That's +1 for SSHD then :)
    – Sun
    Sep 16, 2014 at 17:12
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    @sunk818 The difference is "expensive to recover" and "more expensive to recover". Just use backups and let dead harddrives stay dead. I would expect hybrids to die if either the SSD or the HDD dies - maybe someone else can provide more info?
    – Peter
    Sep 16, 2014 at 17:20
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    Here is what Toshiba has to day on SSD death on a SSHD I have heard that NAND flash can wear out over time. What happens if the NAND component in the Toshiba SSHD reaches its endurance limit? Will data be lost? Should the user exceed the endurance limit of the NAND flash, the Toshiba SSHD will continue functioning as a conventional HDD. However, before the NAND flash component reaches the endurance limits, its performance will gradually decline.
    – Sun
    Sep 16, 2014 at 17:27
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    @sunk818 - By the time the NAND wears out the mechanical parts would have had failed long before that. The lifespan of a typical NAND cell is longer then you expect.
    – Ramhound
    Sep 16, 2014 at 19:24
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Hard drives are best purchased for long term storage, drop a bunch of files on them that aren't often accessed, such as images, videos, etc. They are slower, but cost significantly less than flash storage. As long as you get a decent hard drive, retrieval speeds shouldn't be an issue, so a 7200RPM drive would be a good drive for photo storage.

Solid state drives are good for files that are accessed often such as operating system files, games, high performance applications (photoshop, video editing, etc).

Hybrid drives are a mix between a solid state and a hard drive, meaning they work well as the host for the operating system, games, etc, but they likely won't be as fast, they are most expensive than just a HDD, but cheaper than the same side SSD.

If you just plan on putting files on the drive, go with a HDD, if you plan on putting the operating system on the drive, playing games, or using high performance applications, get an SSD and maybe a HDD for other large files. If this is the only drive that will be in your computer, and you're willing to pay a little bit more for a slightly faster drive that will store all your files, then maybe a SSHD makes sense.

I don't meant to say that these are the only uses for the drive, you can use them however you want, but these are the most often use cases that will give you the most bang for your buck.

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  • Good descriptions and opinion, but how does this help the OP decide which SSHD features to look for when comparing drives? Sep 16, 2014 at 19:21
  • @Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007 My takeaway is to buy the HDD portion of a SSHD with 7200rpm or faster.
    – Sun
    Sep 16, 2014 at 20:42
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You're better off with a SSD and a spare external drive for video storage. Although SSD drive prices are getting pretty reasonable at the 250GB range, which is a good ammount of storage. With a hybrid drive you only get improved performance up to a point. It will be faster for things like start up, but if you want to move large files you'll take a performance hit. Think of a hybrid drive like a regular HDD with a really large cache. Once the fast cache (SSD) fills up you're stuck with using the slower drive (HDD) for cache.

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    this doesn't answer the question, and it is incorrect. Moving large files uses sequential reads/writes which are quite fast on HDDs. Also the cache doesn't just fill up, there are algorithms involved.
    – Peter
    Sep 16, 2014 at 17:50
  • This seems to be a bit of a fundamental misunderstanding of what a hybrid drive is meant to achieve. The whole point is that it caches the main system boot data and the most used programs, not disk accesses in general. This way you get a performance boost for startup and work, but still have the big storage and low cost benefits of spinning platters. For general use it acts exactly like a spinning platter disk, you don't get benefits for small writes, that is what the 8-16MB RAM cache is for, not what the 32GB hybrid part is for.
    – Mokubai
    Sep 16, 2014 at 20:56

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