SSHD vs HDD

[zedselder]

I wanna know which would be better in terms of performance for storage use like watching movies, reading word files, opening pics, listening to songs, mounting ISO files, installing software from them and writing files as well like saving, creating, copying, pasting or cutting. having 4 seagate 2TB SSHD in RAID0 or 2 western digital 4TB black in RAID0?

[x Relentless Xx]

I wanna know which would be better in terms of performance for storage use like watching movies, reading word files, opening pics, listening to songs, mounting ISO files, installing software from them and writing files as well like saving, creating, copying, pasting or cutting. having 4 seagate 2TB SSHD in RAID0 or 2 western digital 4TB black in RAID0?

SSHD's are very unreliable, and typically in the HDD world, the higher the capacity, the more prone to failure the HDD is.

[LeChef]

As far as I know SSHD performance gains over a HDD are negligable. The speed gains are supposed to come from caching frequently used files, but the cache is so small (8GB on 1TB WD drive) that you won't notice it all that much unless you like rewatching the same movie over and over again.

 

[Micky Love]

SSHD is better in only one situation (compared to HDD): booting ! that's all, maybe loading some apps but the SSD part is so small it's not even worth it.

I speak from experience with the Seagate SSHD by the way, and it's actually very slow at transferring files... 

[dizmo]

I wouldn't go with RAID0 unless you plan on doing nightly back ups.

[zedselder]

SSHD's are very unreliable, and typically in the HDD world, the higher the capacity, the more prone to failure the HDD is.

 

 

As far as I know SSHD performance gains over a HDD are negligable. The speed gains are supposed to come from caching frequently used files, but the cache is so small (8GB on 1TB WD drive) that you won't notice it all that much unless you like rewatching the same movie over and over again.

 

 

 

SSHD is better in only one situation (compared to HDD): booting ! that's all, maybe loading some apps but the SSD part is so small it's not even worth it.

I speak from experience with the Seagate SSHD by the way, and it's actually very slow at transferring files... 

so your all saying that the black HDD are faster 

[zedselder]

I wouldn't go with RAID0 unless you plan on doing nightly back ups.

i will be doing a backup every week on my NAS and external HDD

[x Relentless Xx]

so your all saying that the black HDD are faster

Im saying if you go HDD, dont go anything higher than 1, MAYYBBEEE 2TB per drive.

[zedselder]

Im saying if you go HDD, dont go anything higher than 1, MAYYBBEEE 2TB per drive.

that would kill me i need 8TB and i can have as much as 4 drives max

[x Relentless Xx]

that would kill me i need 8TB and i can have as much as 4 drives max

4x2TB drives...there you go

[zedselder]

4x2TB drives...there you go

ah ok thats great

[Mighty_Miro_WD]

Hi there @dexzizo!

 

SSHD is basically a HDD with a 4 or 8GB SSD used as cache. You have no control over what the SSD stores in its cache, it uses an built in algorithm to determine which frequently used files it will cache. As such, they are good boot drives.

 

However, I personally would prefer to make a RAID 0 with 2 drives because RAID 0 is not a redundant array - if one of the RAID 0 member disks fails, all the data is lost. The greater a number of disks in RAID 0, the less the array reliability and the less time to a data loss.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Cheers!

[OmarM89]

I wanna know which would be better in terms of performance for storage use like watching movies, reading word files, opening pics, listening to songs, mounting ISO files, installing software from them and writing files as well like saving, creating, copying, pasting or cutting. having 4 seagate 2TB SSHD in RAID0 or 2 western digital 4TB black in RAID0?

 

go with 3*3TB WDs in raid5

[zedselder]

 

Hi there @dexzizo!

 

SSHD is basically a HDD with a 4 or 8GB SSD used as cache. You have no control over what the SSD stores in its cache, it uses an built in algorithm to determine which frequently used files it will cache. As such, they are good boot drives.

 

However, I personally would prefer to make a RAID 0 with 2 drives because RAID 0 is not a redundant array - if one of the RAID 0 member disks fails, all the data is lost. The greater a number of disks in RAID 0, the less the array reliability and the less time to a data loss.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Cheers!

 

but i still didn't get the answer i need, in terms of storage performance in the above mentioned situations which would excel and in which case would the SSHD be better and in which case would the HDD better?

[TheMcSame]

but i still didn't get the answer i need, in terms of storage performance in the above mentioned situations which would excel and in which case would the SSHD be better and in which case would the HDD better?

They'd be about the same in everything other than booting and game load times. SSHD's are pointless and the only reason they exist is so companies can sell a low performance drive that wont do well on it's own and pair it with some (likely terrible) NAND flash mem and charge you more.

[tmlhalo]

You can make your own SSHD. Just have to buy an SSD you want to use as a cache for your HDD and software if it isn't included. 

Such as this kit

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820171667

Or any 64 GB SSD and Primocache. Most caching software doesn't support past 64GBs for cache capacity.

[zedselder]

You can make your own SSHD. Just have to buy an SSD you want to use as a cache for your HDD and software if it isn't included. 

Such as this kit

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820171667

Or any 64 GB SSD and Primocache. Most caching software doesn't support past 64GBs for cache capacity.

 

 

They'd be about the same in everything other than booting and game load times. SSHD's are pointless and the only reason they exist is so companies can sell a low performance drive that wont do well on it's own and pair it with some (likely terrible) NAND flash mem and charge you more.

Thanks a lot for the help

[ManWithBeard1990]

As much as I like the SSHDs, you really shouldn't be using four of them in RAID0. The chance of a single harddrive failing isn't nonexistent and if one out of four fails the data on the other three is unuseable. I would refrain from using RAID0 for more than two drives TBH because with each drive added to the array you increase the likelihood of failure. Of the two the pair of 4TB harddrives is probably more reliable whereas the sshd array will be faster. the cache adds up in RAID0 too so performance benefits a lot.

In the end both solutions will probably work fine for you but know that arraying drives is an inherently unreliable thing to do, and making frequent backups is a good practice for when it all goes wrong.

[zedselder]

As much as I like the SSHDs, you really shouldn't be using four of them in RAID0. The chance of a single harddrive failing isn't nonexistent and if one out of four fails the data on the other three is unuseable. I would refrain from using RAID0 for more than two drives TBH because with each drive added to the array you increase the likelihood of failure. Of the two the pair of 4TB harddrives is probably more reliable whereas the sshd array will be faster. the cache adds up in RAID0 too so performance benefits a lot.

In the end both solutions will probably work fine for you but know that arraying drives is an inherently unreliable thing to do, and making frequent backups is a good practice for when it all goes wrong.

whats my chances of array failure in 2 drives and in 4?

[ManWithBeard1990]

whats my chances of array failure in 2 drives and in 4?

Mate I don't even know the failure rates of one of these things.

Looking at how long the average hdd lasts at my home I'd say a 4 drive array may fail within about 1.5 years on average, and 2 drive after about 3 years. However this is an extremely rough estimate. When and if your particular array will fail is completely unpredictable. The point was just that having more individual points of failure increases the chance of, well, failure.

The real problem here is that if one of the four drives is broken, you don't just lose a some of your files. You lose pieces of every file, rendering every single one of them unuseable. If what you want is high capacity and also reliability you should maybe look into RAID 5 or 6.

[zedselder]

Mate I don't even know the failure rates of one of these things.

Looking at how long the average hdd lasts at my home I'd say a 4 drive array may fail within about 1.5 years on average, and 2 drive after about 3 years. However this is an extremely rough estimate. When and if your particular array will fail is completely unpredictable. The point was just that having more individual points of failure increases the chance of, well, failure.

The real problem here is that if one of the four drives is broken, you don't just lose a some of your files. You lose pieces of every file, rendering every single one of them unuseable. If what you want is high capacity and also reliability you should maybe look into RAID 5 or 6.

nop nop im in for performance i have an 18TB NAS and a 5TB external HDD so i will make a backup every week on them but when i posted this question i had concerns that the SSHD would some how outperform the HDD in terms of performance due to the 8GB SSD on each of the 4 drives and also due to the fact that the physical drives have a speed of 7200RPM and 64MB of cache on them. 

[Captain_WD]

I wanna know which would be better in terms of performance for storage use like watching movies, reading word files, opening pics, listening to songs, mounting ISO files, installing software from them and writing files as well like saving, creating, copying, pasting or cutting. having 4 seagate 2TB SSHD in RAID0 or 2 western digital 4TB black in RAID0?

 

 

Hey dexzizo,

 

You won't benefit much from the SSHD in general for these usages as it stores files from programs that you mostly use and if you do a variety of things, it shouldn't bring you much benefits. However, RAID0 generally benefits from more drives. Having two drives in RAID0 theoretically doubles the speed. Having four drives should multiply the speed by four and thus give you better read/write numbers. I should warn you that using non-NAS/RAID class drives in a RAID array might result in drive dropouts and data loss. The risk of losing data with more drives in RAID0 is significantly higher than using less drives. For best speeds and reliability I would recommend either using a couple of WD Red drives in RAID0 or simply get a SSD.

 

Captain_WD.