SSHD vs HDD vs SSD

The best option by far for most people is a small SSD and large HDD. You put the things that benefit from performance on the SSD (Operating system, programs) and you keep everything else on the HDD (music, photos, videos and games if your SSD is on the smaller side).

The SSHDs are convenient in that you only have one drive to manage and they offer some of the benefits of SSDs. But most only have small caches (~8GB) and they can only guess at what you want to keep on the faster SSD portion. They'll often guess wrong and when they do you're back to HDD performance.

If you go a 128GB SSD & 2TB HDD you'll find you have to spend maybe 40-50% more than a 2TB SSHD. But you're getting proper native flash storage which I'll take any day of the week.

If you go separate SSD & HDD (particularly if you go with the budget 120GB SSD, rather than the ideally sized 250GB ones) you do need to understand what each drive does and know how to check your disk space on the SSD... and know how (and when) to install programs on the HDD instead of the SSD. It's not rocket science, but if you just want it to 'work' without any thought or effort, the SSHD might be a better option.

But for me... SSD (min 120, ideally 250) + HDD (whatever size you require) is by far the preferred option.

The 2 TB Seagate SSHDs have about a 1.13% failure rate between 6 and 12 months of operation. By comparison, here's some of the industry's worst which break the 2% mark:

- 4,76% WD Black WD4001FAEX
- 4,24% WD Black WD3001FAEX
- 3,83% WD SE WD3000F9YZ
- 2,56% HGST Travelstar 7K1000
- 2,39% Toshiba DT01ACA300

2TB drives do a lot better, the Toshiba is the only 2 TB model over 2%

I have about 12 of them ....oldest being 4 years old. I have a test box (two Samsung 256 GB 840 Pros / 2 Seagate 2 TB SSDs. 1 2TB HD) and here's what I have observed:

SSD boots Win 7 in 15.6 secs
SSHD boots Win 7 in 16.5 secs
HD boots Win 7 in 21.2 secs

Even at 256 GB storing games on the SSD is a PITA as things have to be swapped out. The SSD swaps out the game files automatically.... finish FC3 and start FC4, by the 3rd load, FC3 is gone and FC4 is on the SSD portion.

Here's THGs test results in gaming

SSHD = 9.76 MB/s
WD Black = 6.34 MB/s

Be wary of so called reliability studies that inappropriately use desktop drives in a server environment. It's a setup. It's the actual protective features of a desktop drive that make them prematurely fail in a cold storage server environment. Desktop drives, at least most of them, include a feature called head parking which sets the drive arm and head in a pisition where if vibration occurs say from someone bumping your desk, the head can not crash into the platter.

On one hand, the more aggressive the manufacturer is in applying this protection, the more poorly it will serve in a server environment. Drives are rated fro somewhere between 300k and 500k cycles of "head parking", a cyckle being defined as receiving a request reading (or writing) it and returning tot he parked position.... in a server environment where the drives are repeatedly accessed by many different sources every second, they could use up 50k cycles in a month. Hitachi drives do very well here because they don't even have the command in their firmware.

The best approach in my experience is an SSD (OS, apps) + SSHD (games / data) .... but failing that I'm quite happy with single drive SSHDs...all of our laptops have had SSHDs. Thisworks extremely well.... there is no "guessing" going on., As you can see by THGs gaming benchmarks they kick tail being 50+% faster than any same speed HD. They simply monitor what you do and respond accordingly....If you are playing FC3, it will move FC3s files to the SSD.... stop playing FC3 and start FC4 and after a few loads, FC3 is gone and FC4 is all over the SSHD portion.

I have tested it every way from Sunday on the test box and as a result I will never own another HD.

A 250 GB SSD + 2 TB SSHD is a $25 premium over a SSD + 2 TB HD .... to save $25, a HD makes no sense whats over.

OTOH, if ya on a budget, a $90 SSD versus a $80 SSD is $170 .... $70 more than an SSHD.... if that means a build has to go from a 970 to a 960.... I'll take the 970 and the SSHD

Righ