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I want to upgrade my laptop with a 1TB hard drive. Can you help me compare the SSHD/hybrid and HDD drives for laptops?

Is the SSHD robust, reliable? What is the best (price/quality) SSHD and HDD? I really like WD, but I only find Seagate SSHD.

I have HP db5 1080eh laptop, and as I know it comes with SATA, so I don't know the SSD could speed up things...

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  • This site is not for shopping advice! You may want to read the help section to understand more.
    – Dave
    Aug 30, 2013 at 12:52
  • @DaveRook This site is for (among others) compare the SSHDs and HDDs. If you don't have constructive comments, please leave this post! Aug 30, 2013 at 12:58
  • @tamas.pflanzner you may want to edit your question to make it more vendor neutral. Aug 30, 2013 at 13:29
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    See blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/qa-is-hard-lets-go-shopping – if you're here for opinions, you're unfortunately in the wrong place. The best SSD and HDD will become outdated pretty fast, and we don't allow shopping recommendations because they're only useful to the asker at the time of posting the question, and not to a broader audience. For a general comparison between HDDs vs. SSDs, this would still be too broad of a question though.
    – slhck
    Aug 30, 2013 at 14:08
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    @tamas.pflanzner - Actually Superuser isn't actually made for this type of question. You have not asked a single question that hasn't be locked in the 11 days you have been here. You clearly don't understand Superuser. I suggest you read the Help Center to get an idea of what this site is about.
    – Ramhound
    Aug 30, 2013 at 14:13

1 Answer 1

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The answer depends on your usage.

Large SSD disks are expensive but will be very fast for almost any IO. SSHD disks are moderately priced but once you've exhausted the data cached to the SSD portion of the disk you are back to normal disk speeds. Spinning disks are...well what we're all used to.

I personally would stick with a "normal" SSD in a laptop unless you need so much space the cost is prohibitive AND you can't get by with a USB drive for that storage. So if you just want to be able to fit your movies etc I'd get a SSD + external USB. If you are editing videos or other large files a hybrid disk makes more sense.

As far as SSD speeding up your laptop, yes it will be MUCH faster for most use cases compared to a traditional disk, SATA connected or not. SSDs offer two main benefits over traditional disk - they don't have to move physical objects (no spin up time and essentially no seek times) so non-sequential operations don't take near the performance hit and they can go to a low power state and back with little performance cost.

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  • Thank you for your answer. I need at least 1TB space, so the SSD is out of the game. The two possibility is: SSHD or HDD. I usually using my laptop for developing, movies. I'm ok with the HDD speed, but it could be faster. But I don't have experience with SSHDs, that's why I'm here. Do you use SSHD? What are your experiences? What do you think, what is the best HDD and SSHD model right now? Aug 30, 2013 at 13:42
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    @tamas.pflanzner - SSHD are very new to the market your not going to find very many people with opinion of them. Even if you do their opinion is flawed because they have not been out on the market long enough to judge them.
    – Ramhound
    Aug 30, 2013 at 13:51
  • I have a lot of experience with the enterprise versions, not the ones you'd use in a laptop. They work very well BUT I can't speak to reliability/compatibility for consumer versions. Aug 30, 2013 at 13:55
  • @tamas.pflanzner If your using it for huge files, you probably want to concider that the SSD portion of a hybrid drive is usually not big enough to cache the huge files. Analise how your data that your using would FIT in the fast portion, and how that would benifit.
    – Psycogeek
    Aug 30, 2013 at 14:52

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