Solid state hybrid drives

Jct

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Apr 2, 2015
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Hi, when considering which hard drive to buy I'm considering going for a quicker drive than the normal HDD. However, I don't have the money for a large capacity SSD. Do SSHDs give a reasonable performance increase compared to HDDs? How does storage on them work because aren't they HDDs with some SSD space built in? How does that show up when installing programs?
 
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I have a Seagate Momentus XT SSHD that works well. It is a little faster than a regular drive. The firmware certainly works well to speed up programs that are used often. Windows startup is a little faster. If you run the same benchmark repetitively you can see a speed up.
I would recommend it but don't expect to get anywhere near the performance of an SSD.
The SSD is just a cache for the hard drive. You do not have control over the SSD flash, if you using certain files more often, that will be stored in the SSD cache which will load them faster. It is done by its own software/controller inside the drive. You typically get 8GB of flash for the cache.
 

Jct

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So would the performance increase be enough to justify a SSHD? is there a certain brand/model that is faster or more reliable? im looking at getting a 500GB one.
 

JoeMomma

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Nov 17, 2010
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I have a Seagate Momentus XT SSHD that works well. It is a little faster than a regular drive. The firmware certainly works well to speed up programs that are used often. Windows startup is a little faster. If you run the same benchmark repetitively you can see a speed up.
I would recommend it but don't expect to get anywhere near the performance of an SSD.
 
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