10-02-2024, 10:41 AM
(10-02-2024, 09:50 AM)Radio Fixer Wrote: "Today I bought a SSHD. It's a Hybrid drive with Flash and HDD."Normally I'd agree.
I cant see the point in this as a Seagate 1 TB SSD can be bought at about the same price (just a quick search) as a 1 TB Hybrid. Perhaps the Hybrid is faster for Gamers?
It was at about 1/4 normal price or I'd not have bothered. In fact a Samsung pure 1T SSD can be half the price. However there is a totally huge variation on performance and life of SSDs. The really cheap ones essentially use the same Nand Flash as eMMC on a phone or tablet and similar to Flash in a USB stick. I remember a Netbook with "SSD" and cutting away some internal plastic, ribbon to HDD adaptor and 1.8″ HDD was faster for writes and some big block reads if disk defragged. That Flash was only faster on small block random access read.
Someone also tested high speed SD cards and found that while video application can be fast (large blocks), there was a huge variation on different makes with same rating for small block access, like in an ereader, or using a phone/tablet to edit/create/read non-video content.
The difference between good PCIe NVMe speeds and typical SSD SATA is huge. Also larger than 512G SSD may be slower due to more layers in chip, but some 512G are twice as fast as 256G, because it's the same chips as on a 256G, but interleaved addressing between the chips. When I last looked to put a PCIe NVMe in a laptop for a friend that had a SATA HDD, the 512G was best value and performance. The higher capacity per chip Flash using more layers is also likely less durable.
I think having a separate SSD and HDD is far better, but few laptops have that option. Though a sort of current product, I think the hybrid drive, an SSHD, is a niche and it's performance drops to about 1% on a large transfer like cloning a partition. I abandoned that as it was going to take about 10x longer than cloning to a regular SATA HDD in a USB 3.0 box. The Seagate PDF spec seems a bit opaque. However it has SMART reporting which most Flash/SSD do not, thus there is no advance warning of total failure with most SSDs and all USB Flash memory sticks.
