Hybrid Drives

[AntiHero]

So I'm curious if anyone has any opinions on hybrid drives? I personally had 1 in a laptop for about 6 months and it bricked on me so i just replaced it with a full SSD, so needless to say I'm not a fan but like, whats the target customer for these things? Pros and cons? Positive and negative personal experiences? Best of both worlds or do they exist simply because they can?

[samlittle]

I suppose they’re good if you want increased performance on a budget - especially if you have large files to store. Cheap SSDs are now available but most likely without a d-ram cash. You may as well have a HDD instead of these cheap ones. Hybrids are good if you don’t have both an SSD for the OS and a separate drive for games or whatever else. From my experience, hybrid drives give that snappiness of an SSD in the OS, opening explorer for example but at larges capacities.

 

I personally think that the target customers of these drives are probably system intergraters that produce relatively low end systems but want a price markup for the increased speed. Even decent SSDs are so much cheaper now though, hybrids didn’t really get a chance as people just want straight for the faster drive.

[tikker]

A bit of a mix between the because they can and best of both worlds I think. If I'm not mistaken, the SSD part is used as cache.

[AntiHero]

7 minutes ago, tikker said:

A bit of a mix between the because they can and best of both worlds I think. If I'm not mistaken, the SSD part is used as cache.

yeah its like suppose to learn which files are accessed most frequently to improve speed 

[AntiHero]

11 minutes ago, samlittle said:

I suppose they’re good if you want increased performance on a budget - especially if you have large files to store. Cheap SSDs are now available but most likely without a d-ram cash. You may as well have a HDD instead of these cheap ones. Hybrids are good if you don’t have both an SSD for the OS and a separate drive for games or whatever else. From my experience, hybrid drives give that snappiness of an SSD in the OS, opening explorer for example but at larges capacities.

 

I personally think that the target customers of these drives are probably system intergraters that produce relatively low end systems but want a price markup for the increased speed. Even decent SSDs are so much cheaper now though, hybrids didn’t really get a chance as people just want straight for the faster drive.

I can image ever going back to anything with moving parts at this point though, i have 1 HDD left in my desktop for mass storing bullshit, but i mean, i guess thats what they're best at! Hell i even went out and got solid state for my games library. Maybe its cause im a PC mustard rice snob... but i haaaate long load times, and some modern games can take forever on an old school hard drives to load!

[Meganter]

5 minutes ago, AntiHero said:

I can image ever going back to anything with moving parts at this point though, i have 1 HDD left in my desktop for mass storing bullshit, but i mean, i guess thats what they're best at! Hell i even went out and got solid state for my games library. Maybe its cause im a PC mustard rice snob... but i haaaate long load times, and some modern games can take forever on an old school hard drives to load!

I think that's the purpose of HDD nowadays, mass storage and that's it.

[WereCatf]

1 hour ago, AntiHero said:

I personally had 1 in a laptop for about 6 months and it bricked on me

That's the whole reason why I don't recommend them; if either the built-in SSD or the built-in HDD goes kaputt, they're both useless. Also, combining two different devices like that increases the chance of a failure when compared to having only one or the other.

 

Really, the only place where I could see one being useful is in a PS4: it doesn't support TRIM, so using a plain SSD will get slower and slower over time whereas an SSHD handles TRIM internally, and SSHD will be faster than a plain HDD.

[AntiHero]

Quote

That's the whole reason why I don't recommend them; if either the built-in SSD or the built-in HDD goes kaputt, they're both useless. Also, combining two different devices like that increases the chance of a failure when compared to having only one or the other. 

 

Really, the only place where I could see one being useful is in a PS4: it doesn't support TRIM, so using a plain SSD will get slower and slower over time whereas an SSHD handles TRIM internally, and SSHD will be faster than a plain HDD.

Yeah that makes alot of sense, more components, more chances to go wrong after all. I have a very narrow selection of games i play on PS4 at this point i only use it for exclusive titles but that is good to know.