SSHD Worth it?

Hey guys, I saw on amazon that they sell a Seagate 4TB SSHD and I was wondering if is worth it on a $170 price tag. I needed a good drive for my wife ring for storage and to run games from it since her main drive is a 240GB SSD. I ended up picking up a Seagate 3TB 7200rpm drive instead for $114 and was curious if I should had invested instead on the SSHD.

If you want SSHD then better look at Toshiba or other brands. Seagates have high failure rate and are slower than the competition. In my tests Seagate SSHD 500/1000GB was 50% slower than the Toshiba SSHD 1TB. In sequential read it was 100MB/s vs 180MB/s and that's a huge difference.

SSHD is faster in games and it's not so bad idea if you have low budget but it won't be even close to SSD. Main reason is too low cache. Most SSHD have 8GB cache what isn't enough.
SSHD is about 2-5 times faster than HDD in random transfers. Still SSD is 5-20 times faster than the SSHD.

Woomack said:

If you want SSHD then better look at Toshiba or other brands. Seagates have high failure rate and are slower than the competition. In my tests Seagate SSHD 500/1000GB was 50% slower than the Toshiba SSHD 1TB. In sequential read it was 100MB/s vs 180MB/s and that's a huge difference.

SSHD is faster in games and it's not so bad idea if you have low budget but it won't be even close to SSD. Main reason is too low cache. Most SSHD have 8GB cache what isn't enough.
SSHD is about 2-5 times faster than HDD in random transfers. Still SSD is 5-20 times faster than the SSHD.

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I see, what I did was with the 3TB that I got was to partition 2T for backup such as picture and movies from the family and the other 1TB for installing games that are very large like WOW, AION etc.. which are about 13GB-to-50GB in size. Hopefully is fast enough without losing to much form the SSD since it will run other programs from there. I was able to free up about 80GB from the SSD which is nice.

Thanks for the info I will keep an eye out for another SSD later on or maybe even grab a 512 to a 1T when the prices are better.

If going for SSHD my opinion would be to look at something like this,
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236642

At the least it has the 120GB SSD cache.

If she has an SSD as her main drive, I wouldn't worry so much having mechanical as alternate drive(s).

It's not 120GB cache, it's 120GB SSD + 1TB HDD just closed in one 2.5" package. Performance on SSD part of the drive is lower than most cheaper SSD can offer. Saves space and that's all.

Oh I was aware that it only offers 100MB/s thoroughput, I was not under the assumption it was an actual SSD unit (regarding the 120GB). Thanks for the info!

It was one I was looking at though to replace the 1TB SSHD(with 8GB cache) that came in my Lenovo Y50. Learn something every day.

I believe that this WD has 2 drives connected to one SATA bus that's why bandwidth of each drive is below expectations. If I remember it good then SSD had ~350MB/s and HDD 100MB/s+. Anyway if you have some more space then better is to buy 2 drives. Most laptops will support mpcie, m.2 or other SSD and you can also find HDD adapters which you can put into optical drive bay. In total most laptops can work with 3 drives.

The only SSHD which I saw with larger cache were some drives in MSI gaming laptops with 20 or 24GB cache but I don't know who is manufacturing them. I haven't seen anything with more than 8GB on retail market.

I can't imagine that 16 or 32GB cache isn't possible. I can also can't imagine that the performance boost made by doing so would worry manufacturers that such a product would eat into sales of other lines.

As soon as they make a 4TB SSHD with 32GB cache, I'm all over that.

If you're only buying one, a large ssd makes sense. If you just want sheer storage, 5900 rpm is better than 7200 because it runs cooler and apparently has a better lifespan. I've had seagates from 1-4tb without issue. Mine come with 32MB or 64MB cache. I've never heard of 8GB SSHD, but they appear to use the same 1TB platters.

Xenohitsu said:

5900 rpm is better than 7200 because it runs cooler and apparently has a better lifespan.

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What?

Railgun said:

I can't imagine that 16 or 32GB cache isn't possible. I can also can't imagine that the performance boost made by doing so would worry manufacturers that such a product would eat into sales of other lines.

As soon as they make a 4TB SSHD with 32GB cache, I'm all over that.

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Larger cache will raise price of the drive to the point it won't be good option for mass sales. I bet that flash memory prices will drop pretty quick if new magical and expensive technologies won't be appearing too often.
Average system requires about 20GB cache to work without delays as only OS is eating 5GB+ of often used files so when you play new games then there is no way you can load everything to the cache. These drives remember most often used files and are caching them so when you are using OS+Office+web browser then all is fine but when you move to many more applications then 8GB cache is useless.

Xenohitsu said:

If you're only buying one, a large ssd makes sense. If you just want sheer storage, 5900 rpm is better than 7200 because it runs cooler and apparently has a better lifespan. I've had seagates from 1-4tb without issue. Mine come with 32MB or 64MB cache. I've never heard of 8GB SSHD, but they appear to use the same 1TB platters.

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We are talking about SSHD, not HDD. All SSHD on mass market have 8GB cache right now.
There is minimal difference in temps between 5400 and 7200 rpm drives. Even if there was like 5*C difference then who cares if drive has 35 or 40*C ? Anyway Seagate drives fail the same regardless of speed. There is simply no worse brand on the HDD market than Seagate if you look at the reliability right now.

Woomack said:

Larger cache will raise price of the drive to the point it won't be good option for mass sales. I bet that flash memory prices will drop pretty quick if new magical and expensive technologies won't be appearing too often.
Average system requires about 20GB cache to work without delays as only OS is eating 5GB+ of often used files so when you play new games then there is no way you can load everything to the cache. These drives remember most often used files and are caching them so when you are using OS+Office+web browser then all is fine but when you move to many more applications then 8GB cache is useless.

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Perhaps. But consider this. You can get a 32GB SSD from adata, granted, not the fastest, for $34. I'll concede that it's not simply a price tacked on, but if that increases the cost of said sshd, call it $50, then I'm ok with that.

For me, I use DAS, and this would be fantastic for what I do. I'm sure 8GB would be sufficient for most uses, but why stop there.

We've seen results of SSD used for caching and with regular HDD, solution like that could achieve much higher performance than the SSHD. I have no idea why SSHD are so slow ( even though up to 5x faster than HDD in random transfers ).
SSHD with 32GB SSD for caching should cost maybe 30% more than current SSHD and I would pay for that if it could reach 50% of SSD performance, not 10%.
SSD used to be much more expensive but recently price is only dropping so should be easier to raise cache to at least 16GB.

It's not hard to notice that HDD market is barely changing. Even SSD are barely changing in last 2-3 years. There was a big difference between SATA2 and SATA3 SSD but since then we can barely see any performance improvements while all manufacturers are improving "only" reliability and are adding encryption etc.
Even these magical PCIe/M.2 SSD which can make 1GB/s+ are not much better in random transfers than 2-3 year old SATA SSD. For me SSD are good because of random bandwidth, not sequential while manufacturers still put sequential transfers and system boot time as main reason to move to SSD. Realy who cares if system is loading 5 seconds or 20 when later you have work couple of hours ?

Agreed regarding loading times. If I cared, I wouldn't be booting off a RAID, which I've been doing for the better part of eight years.

I also agree that the HDD side of things isn't moving all that fast. Other than some decent size options now, I'd still look to some sort of RAID as 1) no way would I put 8TB of data on a single disk and 2) single drive performance is crap, relatively speaking.

I can work with lots of little files (audio) or lots of large (photos or videos). While having a seperate SSD as cache is all good, it's extra HW that I don't necessarily have the room for and simply don't want that. I'd rather have a

In the grand scheme of things, does it really matter? No, or at least probably not. But as NV memory has become pretty cheap, I don't see this 8GB cache staying for long.