seagate SSHD hybrid drive?

t103Ninja · 18 Mar 2014 at 16:35

hey guys, im currently using a 1tb western digital blue drive to store my games on wich is getting the job done so game however are painfully slow to load

i was considering an SSD i already have one as a boot drive and its brilliant but for a games drive i would want atleast 500gb wich is rather exspensive
i stumbled across some hybrid drives from seagate they claim to give SSD like performance with up to 2tb capacity

has anyone actualy got one of these?
i thinking about getting the 2tb version as my game drive

ndaar · 18 Mar 2014 at 17:07

Here is a link to a review of the drive:

http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_desktop_sshd_review

It certainly offers a bump over a traditional hd, however doesnt match an ssd for performance purely because the amount of memory available to the drive to cache files in the "quicker" section of the drive is limited.

As you say a 500gb ssd drive is still a lot more expensive than traditional drive options.

There are two schools of thought, invest in the more expensive ssd drive and take it with you to your next build (prices are a lot better than they used to be)

Or accept that you will have to suffer longer load times and opt to stick with your current drive or go for a hybrid.

cwgk91 · 19 Mar 2014 at 08:57

I have the 1TB one, as well as a 500GB ssd and the hybrid definitely does not have SSD like performance.

It is definitely faster than a normal hdd, though the ssd space inside the hybrid is limited, and takes a while to learn what you use most often. it then keeps that on the ssd in the drive to increase read/write speeds for those pieces of software.

t103Ninja · 19 Mar 2014 at 19:47

cwgk91 said:
I have the 1TB one, as well as a 500GB ssd and the hybrid definitely does not have SSD like performance.

It is definitely faster than a normal hdd, though the ssd space inside the hybrid is limited, and takes a while to learn what you use most often. it then keeps that on the ssd in the drive to increase read/write speeds for those pieces of software.

so it only boosts what i use most often?
im guessing that wouldnt make it very good for a games storage drive then as i have a lot of different games

Minstadave · 19 Mar 2014 at 19:52

Yeah the benefits of the sshd will be mainly for using it as an OS drive where there are numerous small files you load regularly which will be cached. When you're infrequently loading large amounts of data (your usage) the befits will be less.

I use a SSD as my main drive with the odd game on it, and a mechanical drive for steam. I use an app to move steam games onto the SSD if I play them regularly. However it's rare I find anything that loads slowly from the HDD, have you tried benching it to see what speeds your getting?

badbiddy · 19 Mar 2014 at 20:06

I have the 750GB version in my MacbookPro. Boot speeds are VERY good, everything feels a lot faster too, but then going from the standard 3 year old 5400rpm Hitachi to a 7200rpm brand new drive it would feel improved anyway.

That said I would recommend them very much so for laptops if you're restricted by space to 1 drive and can't afford one big SSD (like me).

In a PC I would just buy a normal SSD to have the OS and a few choice apps on and keep your existing drive for storage.

Rroff · 20 Mar 2014 at 20:08

OS Booting is really their strong point, if you regularly use certain applications or games you can see big boosts there but its very hit and miss with applications and a lot of games probably won't see that big a bonus from it though it seems to help BF4 a bit on my laptop.

OS booting wise typical figures would be something like: HDD: 45 seconds, Hybrid: 18 seconds, SSD: 11 seconds but that doesn't translate precisely to other uses.

Steveocee · 21 Mar 2014 at 09:43

Buy an SSD (128 or 256) and install the games you play most often onto it.
I have BF4, DayZ, Arma 3 and Verdun in my 128GB M4
The rest (500GB) sits on a 1TB Seagate HDD.

Uncle_Gravy · 21 Mar 2014 at 10:38

I found BF4 loads a multiplayer map a hell of a lot faster on my SSD than what my HDD did, I'm normally the first in and got easy pickings of the vehicles, if it wasn't for my sucky internet i'd probably be first to spawn in most games.

DayZ and Arma 3 I found loads much quicker aswell.

ZXSpectrum · 21 Mar 2014 at 11:14

What system do you have? If you have relatively new Intel Chipset motherboard you could buy a decent 128Gb SSD and a 2Tb 7200Rpm drive and setup SSD Caching. This gives a great overall speedboost for the system.