Hybrid drives? What's the score

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Been looking at upgrading my Hdd to an ssd. But I've noticed the hybrid drives seem to look quite good for my needs. Are they usable in desktop? And also does anyone have experience of them that can steer me in the right direction? Do I go for a small ssd and a larger mechanical for storage or just get the single hybrid? Sorry if this seems a silly question to some of you but I've been out of pc building for years now and can't seem to find the info I need on google
 
It all depends on what your using it for.

An ssd will get you into windows fast and any game or app installed on it will run / open really fast.

A hybrid drive is more like a cache drive that saves the most frequently used data in that cache and loads that data at ssd like speeds. The bad thing is that if you install something on that drive it will take its time in caching that data so for a time you might aswell just have a normal HDD.

So if you want raw speed on everything insalled on that drive the ssd is far faster, The hybrid is like an ssd and a hdd bult into one.

I have an ssd and 1 x 1tb HDD and 2 x 500gb hdd's in raid.

The ssd has BF4 and some other games on it along with windows 7, so boot up times are fast, programs are far more responsive and snappier and games load quick.

Storage is on the 1tb drive, and my other games are on the raid drives. The raid drives are quicker than the single 1tb drive but no where near as fast as the ssd.

My opinion would be just get an SSD and use your current drive as a storage drive ( unless you are using a laptop ).
 
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I have the 5400rpm sshd 2.5" I took from and old laptop and use it as my gaming drive. Works very well. Its already 3 years old but never failed me.
If it doesn't bother you, get the 3.5" tho because they go up to 4tb now and will last for ages.
 
if it's a PC, don't bother. get full SSD for OS and programs and HDD for storage.

if it's a laptop, it's a bit trickier - get the biggest SSD you can afford and remove the ODD to fit in the original HDD. or use NAS.
 
I have just ordered the 2TB Seagate Desktop SSHD to use as a gaming drive. They are basically a Barracuda spec HDD (which is already a fast drive) with an SSD cache. They are not that much more than regular HDD and so I figure it is worth giving one a go. Benchmarks show that on repeat runs (when the data is cached) they almost reach pure SSD speeds. So hopefully it will be good for level / map reloads.

Why not get an SSD for the OS and an SSHD for everything else?
 
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SSD caching/hybrid drives have their place though they aren't an alternative to a pure SSD to give some boot comparisons the times for booting my laptop were something like: hybrid mode disabled: 40-45 seconds, hybrid mode enabled ~18 seconds, then with an SSD and very similiar OS install ~11 seconds.

Likewise for frequently used applications you get similiar kind of gains that are well ahead of a mechanical HDD but not quite there in SSD territory and its a bit hit and miss in regards to what is and isn't cached and obviously sometimes you don't get that speed boost on first running.
 
I've installed two hybrids, one in a mates laptop and one my Mums pc. They're not far off ssds at all in terms of boot times general snappiness.

I'm a bit concerned about how long they'll last though. I prefer decent intel ssds for boot drives.
 
they are ok I suppose,i havnt used one myself,i would be worried with a hdd and integrated ssd though,if either one fails the whole drive is kapputt

atleast by having a separate ssd and separate storage hdd if either fails you can simply replace it ect

ive used ssd caching too and it works well,thats if your motherboard supports it z68 onwards
 
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inogen said:
I'm a bit concerned about how long they'll last though. I prefer decent intel ssds for boot drives.
Click to expand...

Yeah I definitely favor intel SSDs for OS - for some reason (probably due to being on offer) I got a Samsung 840 EVO for this latest build and so far I'm not entirely convinced by it - seem to have managed to stop the BSODs now but I'm still not sure if it was configuration issues or something more inherent to the drive thats gonna come back to bite me in the rear.
 
Ssd for boot yes, then sshd for your gaming drive.
As for how long they last, my sshd used to be a system drive in a laptopfor a year, then I moved it to my desktop and it runs as my gaming drive for past 2 years.
 
Thanx guys after reading through I've decided to go for a 128gb ssd for my boot drive along with high spec games. And a 1tb hybrid for storage. I can get the ssd now and the hybrid at a later date. Thanx for your reponses
 
Thanks for that report. some interesting stuff on there. low load times but burst speed doesnt improve. Which im guessing should be expected because it doesnt use the disk cache. But tbf hybrid looks suitable to me because of the lower level load times. LOL at the velociraptor. Still a fast drive but the chatter must be unbearable
 
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