Hybrid drives.

[Loose rivets]

In this (probably short) burst of enthusiasm for computers, and having been made aware just how slow my PC is, I've ordered an i5 board. To keep the existing SSD or just order a WD Black? (very smooth RMA procedure from ebuyer for that RED I mistakenly ordered.)

I noticed a hybrid drive in that supplier's list. Just another thing I didn't know existed. However, I'm not sure I'd want to put all my eggs in one basket despite the drive having a long-ish warranty.

Apart from caching, there was an integral 6 - 8Gb SSD typically. Given that most people recommend a lot more than that for the OS, does this layout make sense? Eggs in one basket, or best of both worlds?


Mmm . . . one drive had five years warranty on the main picture but when probing deeper, showed three.



.

[Loose rivets]

Finally, I don't think that the SS storage on a hybrid (or even a SSD) is dedicated to run the OS.

That's what was in the back of my mind. With a front-end SSD, with OS loaded on it, seems the best plan for being sure it has enough elbow room.

At this time I imagine MS office sharing the 125Gb partition, and working stuff in the other half to be moved to a HD when non active. There should be room for PhotoShop in the second partition with a few other high demand Apps.

The way I'm going, I might as well have kept the NAS drive. :ugh:

[Momoe]

Hybrid drives are great for specific tasks, however as always there are drawbacks.

The SSD part is effectively a large chunk of flash memory, your OS can be stored on this so the PC boots faster, a lot faster.
If it's large enough, your commonly used programs will also respond a lot quicker, if that is important to you fine.

The downside is SSD drives have a finite write cycle, a non-hybrid SSD will have much larger capacity and so will take longer to 'Wear out' as a different sector is used for every write to even out usage.

The other downside is the HDD media wears faster as most hybrid drives, power down the platter if they are working off the SSD portion, if they need access to the HDD, it then spins up so access to some files may actually seem longer. This spinning up and down is more wearing than keeping the platters spinning for long periods as in pure HDD's.

So, dedicated tasking which fits on the SSD, great because you'll get a consistently faster boot and response time. Multiple applications which won't all fit on the SSD with frequent accessing of storage would make hybrid drives non-viable imho.

[terrain safe]

I've just upgraded to a 256GB M2 SSD drive for main OS and APPs, 240GB SSD for other apps and games and a 2TB HDD for storage plus I've got a server and a NAS drive. My PC is very quick now!

[Jhieminga]

The way I understand it is that on a hybrid drive a piece of software in the controller moves frequently used files to the SSD part of the drive, keeping the rest of the files on the platters. As it needs to 'learn' which files are often used, the performance improvement will not be seen right after installing but this will occur at a later stage. I've looked into getting one for retrofitting in a laptop but will most likely go for a SSD instead. The performance benefit from a hybrid drive is not as large as is possible from a SSD and as the SSD part is relatively small, you will most likely find that unless you're the type who only uses a computer for simple tasks, the SSD section will never hold all the files you'd want to keep there (if you could have a say in that..).

[Loose rivets]

It does occur to me that it might well be of benefit to someone that needs the HD space in a laptop, but doesn't want, or can't, connect a fast external drive, for example in an aircraft. For the PC, the wear factor is significant as we've previously discussed on this forum.

What is so sad is that I can't have two HD's at the ready, so that a failure can be put right 'down the route' with nowt but a small screwdriver and the backup stick. I intend to try drive swapping just to see what happens, but don't want to annoy MS as they've been surprisingly good to me in the past. Maybe it's because I sold hundreds of packs of DOS and a few Windows 3's - which I said was silly and would never catch on.