Are Hybrid Drives viable drives?

[DarklordKyo]

If it comes a time where I upgrade my PC's hard drive, I was considering a Hybrid Drive (for the five or so not in the know, a bit of a jack of all trades combining regular hard drive storage capacity and affordability with Solid State Drive-esque speed).

For anyone who've tried one, is a Hybrid Drive a viable alternative to booting from SSD & storing in HD?

 

[Cap'nPipsqueak]

I think this should probably be in the advice forum. You'd like get more help there.

 

[Saelune]

I think this should probably be in the advice forum. You'd like get more help there.

Thats debatable. Not alot of people regularly check those forums, so responses may take time, and less people will weigh in, giving less varied/complete answers.

 

[Cap'nPipsqueak]

I think this should probably be in the advice forum. You'd like get more help there.

Thats debatable. Not alot of people regularly check those forums, so responses may take time, and less people will weigh in, giving less varied/complete answers.

Eh, if you put it that way, I suppose.

Still thought it should be said, though. I mean we do have an advice forum, so...

 

[KingsGambit_v1legacy]

The short answer is maybe, sort-of, kinda but not really. The idea itself is sound, but the reality is a little lacklustre with the end-result being essentially a standard hard drive. It may speed up some OS processes a little, but not enough to really justify them. You won't have a bad experience with them, but they won't make an appreciable difference.

My honest advice is to either a) get the biggest SSD you can, or b) get a ~128GB SSD for Windows/OS and a standard HDD for mass storage. The power of SSDs lies in the fact they have virtually no seek time, and they are the single most notable speed increase you can buy on a PC now, by leaps and bounds. Years ago one would have said get more memory or faster processor, but neither of those upgrades will have the level of impact on performance as going from HDD to SSD. Programs open almost instantly, Windows loads in < 30s, folders you double click simply open.

As I said, you could buy a hybrid, but it doesn't do either job as well as its traditional counterparts. The main advantages are cost-saving vs SSD (tho it's slightly more costly than an HDD), greater capacity than SSDs and significantly, no "management" of multiple drives, picking what data goes where. From the OSs point of view, the two volumes are transparent and behave as a single drive which is very nice. Eventually it will "learn" what is used most and those things will load up faster but for the most part, it will perform as a normal HDD.

I would honestly recommend getting an SSD, or SSD/HDD pair rather than a hybrid. I do appreciate that cost and/or simplicity may be desirable but the level of performance you'll experience from an SSD is unrivalled and makes HDDs seem like using ancient technology in comparison. They have come down in cost a lot as their popularity has grown so they are affordable. It just comes down to your mass storage requirements. Consider how you store/wish to store and access your media/photos/music/documents/etc, the level of performance you'd like, maximum budget and we can find a solution.

 

[Vern]

I would say no. I've had a desktop PC for a few years now with a 1TB SSD as the primary drive and a 1TB HDD as a backup/storage drive. It boots like a dream, from power on to login is around 15 seconds, compared to the 1 minute 30 seconds when I just had the hard drive. It runs whisper quiet, the first time I went into my HDD after installing the SSD to find some files and I heard the humming sound I was confused for a few seconds before I realized it was the HDD.

I recently bought a laptop a month ago with a 1TB HDD/ 8GB SSD hybrid drive, and it's horrible. It's essentially like going back to an HD, the SD really doesn't seem to do anything. Just opening Google Chrome and scrolling up and down a web page in full screen made it sputter. I kind of fixed it by creating an 8GB virtual memory page file. It now runs steady, but nowhere near the reliability of a computer with a SSD.

So yeah, speaking as someone who bought a 1TB SSD, I can't sing praises enough. I was worried that I would be wasting money buying one, but it's damn hard to go back to working with an HDD. My time isn't that important, but waiting 3 seconds for a file to open versus waiting .1 second makes a difference.

 

[Laughing Man]

Depends on what you do with the computer. If you do alot of stuff that requires a huge amount of HD access then chances are you aren't going to get a lot of benefit from a hybrid drive. On the other hand if you do stuff that requires a little bit of HD access, then chances are you won't get a lot of benefit from a hybrid drive.... seems kinda weird huh?

The reason even standard drives have a section of on board memory that is used by the OS (or onboard firmware) to store stuff it may want to access quickly, the stuff that it uses all the time will either be held here or held in RAM ready to go at a moments notice. All a hybrid drive does is have a slightly larger dedicated part of memory on the drive itself (usually a few gig vs the few mb that typical drives have) and most will have some form of advanced firmware on them designed to do the assumed pre loading of files and stuff it thinks you are likely to use a lot.

The advantages of having one comes down to just how good the firmware that pre loads the files is, if it can get the right files in the right place at the right time it will work but if you start doing stuff, read, writes, large file access that gets round or over the drive limit then you will quickly hit the limitations of these hybrid drives. The issue is that the end user can't dictate what goes on what part of the drive. You would be better buying a smaller SSD that you can stick OS and regular used programs on and a standard HD for long term storage and then move programs between them as the requirement arises. That's what I did on my way from mechanical HDs too full SSD setup.

I recently bought a laptop a month ago with a 1TB HDD/ 8GB SSD hybrid drive, and it's horrible. It's essentially like going back to an HD, the SD really doesn't seem to do anything. Just opening Google Chrome and scrolling up and down a web page in full screen made it sputter. I kind of fixed it by creating an 8GB virtual memory page file. It now runs steady, but nowhere near the reliability of a computer with a SSD.

What? doesn't sound like an HD issue sounds like a RAM or lack of RAM issue, creating a page file just means that files are getting shunted to the HD anyway when the computer runs out of physical RAM, It may help if the Firmware on the Hybrid drive automatically shunts virtual memory data to the SSD part of the drive very weird no idea why Chrome would be hitting any kind of RAM limit or how adding a virtual memory to the system would help with stuttering issues.