Is SSHD effective?

Golf1.6 · 16 Dec 2015 at 17:13

SSHD tend to be £20 more expensive than their HD counterparts. I'm curious if they extra cost is worth it.

I'm looking for a 2TB hard drive for storage purposes only (OS will be on SSD) and a SSHD with 8GB SSD might be worth a punt if it's going to improve seek times.

The mechanical drive is used for my downloads/video collections as well as working location for video rendering etc. Sometimes I hit download and it takes 5-6 seconds for the drive to spool up and allow me to save/open files.

Will a SSHD improve this and store the directory structure in the SSD portion and allow me to use the drive witout the lag?

binaryknight · 16 Dec 2015 at 17:18

if its just purely a storage drive im not sure it will make a lot of difference as 8GB out of 2TB isnt a lot of actual ssd space , i have one in one of my laptops and do find it a bit nippier than a plain hdd but actual read and write speeds are pretty much identical to a regular hdd

cant comment on the spool up as my drive is always running as its the only drive i guess in theory if theres is ssd space left it might buffer there?

zola25 · 17 Dec 2015 at 11:18

To echo what binaryknight said above, there's little advantage to using an SSHD as a storage drive as far as transfer rates go. As you'll constantly be accessing different files you'll rarely be pulling from the cache.

Having said that when compared to the WD green I previously used for storage I never have to wait just to be able to browse the directory structure. It's therefore possible the drive meta data is always cached, but I can't be sure.

Golf1.6 · 17 Dec 2015 at 13:33

binaryknight said:
if its just purely a storage drive im not sure it will make a lot of difference as 8GB out of 2TB isnt a lot of actual ssd space , i have one in one of my laptops and do find it a bit nippier than a plain hdd but actual read and write speeds are pretty much identical to a regular hdd

cant comment on the spool up as my drive is always running as its the only drive i guess in theory if theres is ssd space left it might buffer there?

The sshd drive will apparantly work out which files will be used most frequently and allocate those to the SSD. so potentially the index files, thumbnail files, mbr and other key files, directory structure etc.

The drive I'm looking to replace is my 3rd drive. Primary = SSD OS, Seconday = documents, games etc, tertiary = downloads, videos, multimedia etc.

A lot of the time the 3rd drive is bone idle until I initiate a download and then sometimes the save prompt wait a second or two for the drive to spin up and then allows me to save. It s a little annoying.