Just a thought: Hybrid Drive (SSD + HDD)

The idea just came to me. Since SSDs are generally 2.5inch wide.. and with platters getting as big as.. 1TB per platter now (right?), and with the hard drive controller boards getting smaller...

Why not combine them into a single 3.5inch drive?

Obviously, use the SSD for the OS due to the high read rate and the disk for storage, such as games, and Office, etc.

Hybrid drives already exist. It's not quite the same thing you're talking about, though.

You seem to be talking about basically two separate drives in one. My question is... why? Combine 'em into one, and you have a very expensive drive, and you'll have to replace the whole thing if one part dies, or you want to upgrade, or whatever. It wouldn't really take up any more space to just mount two separate 2.5" drives, one SSD and one HDD, into a 3.5" bay.

Prefer to buy drives as I need them.

I think this would be a big issue. If 1 goes bad you still have to keep the thing or you have to send the whole unit in for RMA. Warrenty issues, the SSD good for what 3 years and the HDD good for 3-5 years?

As well sadly a 3.5" HDD can't really be shrunk much without some major rework on there side. At that a 2.5" SSD would possibly have to be shrunk in size just to help make it fit with the 3.5" drive to just fit in the envelope. To much R&D might be needed for such a task.

Well the could have it two separate pieces. With a seperate datapath between them. Everything passes through ssd, its the OS and the "hybrid" drive cache.

But I am sure it would be considered a EOL spectrum, there will be a maximum data density point coming sooner in mechanical devices than the circuit based ones.

Well. I haven't been keeping up with SSDs, but has their write speed caught up to HDDs write speed?

Yes there write speeds up there or faster then HDD's now. Read speed is well past HDD's in nearly every case. As well read speed is definatly more important in Day to Day tasks then write speed unless your putting some huge files on the drive day in and day out which might make you consider using something other then a SSD (depending on drive size and daily write amounts).

that does sound cool, i see alot of people online with a ssd to boot from, and a 1 or 1.5 tb drive for storage, a 2 in 1 would be cdool