Hybrid Drive Questions

[Maccat123]

Hi guys, recently built my system back after Christmas and as was already a bit over budget decided to cheap out on an SSHD as oppose to full SSD to save some money and better fund the money into a nicer case from my old Z11 and for the ddr4 ram that I neglected to note was needed. 
Basically my question on this is that in the file manager section to see my drives, the hybrid drive displays as a single drive, I can't find clarification if this should be anywhere. 
I apologise for seeming a layman on this however I would have assumed it'd display two drives, but then again I guess it makes sense as it's a single cable. 
I ask this as with Win 10 installed my useable HDD is at 930 out of the 1Tb, (https://www.scan.co.uk/products/1tb-seagate-st1000dx001-sshd-hybrid-hdd-35-sata-6gb-s-64mb-cache-8ms-oem-ncq link for reference) 

Cheers and sorry for the silly question, have a good day  

[APasz]

An SSHD is a HDD with an integrated SSD for caching of the HDD, It isn't a dual drive.

[TheShadow208]

I say this with only knowing a little about SSHD and I have never owned one before, but I assume that Its really a HDD that has a SSD to speed up read and write times, which isn't a bad thing at all but I'm the same as you, I assumed it was two separate drives inside haha

[Xenift]

Having a SSHD dramatically boosts the start up time of your PC.

However, if you restart/force shutdown the PC, the data required to fast start the computer will not be cached and hence no fast boot is available.

Otherwise in terms of general performance, it performs identical to normal HDD.  

[Maccat123]

Thanks guys, especially Xenift, I understood the bare bones of the SSHD in terms of it having the ssd but wasn't sure for anything else, your answer really cleared that up, thanks!

[Captain_WD]

4 hours ago, The Lolikiller said:

~snip~

 

Hey there

 

The guys gave you some good info on this. Here are my two cents on the topic: 

SSHDs or hybrid drives are basically regular HDDs with a small (usually 8GB) SSD portion that is used solely for caching the HDD. The drive itself has its own algorithm and determines which applications you are using the most and stores their files for faster loading (such as the OS). You, however, have no control whatsoever over this and don't really have access to the SSD portion of the drive. Think of it as the regular cache on a normal HDD. SSHD drives are great for single-bay systems that are used primarily for just a few applications but are rather impractical if you have a SSD for the OS and use them as secondary storage drives or you use the computer for all kinds of things and don't have main applications. 

 

Drives that come with combined HDD and SSD are called Dual drives and you can treat each portion separately. A good example would be WD Black2: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=n7MxvS . Unlike hybrid drives, dual drives allow you to choose whch goes to the SSD and which - to the HDD. The things that go on the SSD work at full SSD speed while the things on the HDD work at regular HDD speeds and you have full control over which goes where.

 

Post back if you need more info on this!

 

Captain_WD.

[vi]

so if I understand this correctly with a Hybrid you load all programs  on  the HDD - the (usually) 8 GB SSD isn't THE C drive?

 

[Maccat123]

The C drive is my HDD, I assume that the ssd knows what I use the most and caches for it from what's been said.

[Captain_WD]

On 13.02.2016 г. at 3:21 AM, vi said:

~snip~

 

No, the SSD portion of a hybrid drive is not the C drive. 

The SSD portion is the cache of the drives. Regular HDDs have (typically) 64MB of cache and it's not a SSD while hybrid drives have 8GB SSD caching portions which allows for much more data to be stored there for faster communication and processing. DAta from the whole HDD portion of a hybrid drive can be stored on the cache, regardless if the whole drive is partitioned as one huge C drive or has multiple portions. If you have a program that you use very often that is installed on the D drive it will still cache it on the SSD portion.

 

Captain_WD.