A hybrid hard drive is neither fish nor fowl. What is a hybrid hard drive? Hybrid hard drive or regular

Hi all.

It's time to get acquainted with the concept of a “hybrid hard drive”, as it is increasingly being heard. Would you like to increase the speed of your computer? I have no doubt that yes. And at the same time, naturally, you want to save money? Then read on.

Hybrid drive - what is it?

A hybrid hard drive, or in English SSHD (solid-state hybrid drive), is a cross between the old hard drive that is in your computer and a comparatively new technology - a solid-state drive. To make the situation clearer, you need to understand what one and the other are.

The one we are used to consists of plates and read heads that spin at incredible speeds.

Such a mechanism takes up a lot of space, makes noise and is prone to breakage when shaking.

Therefore, manufacturers came up with an improved version - which does not have any rotating elements, but consists only of a memory chip.

Despite the fact that solid-state drives appeared in the 80s, they are still not going to become cheaper. True, the high price is justified by the ultra-fast work. To balance the situation, the developers created a hybrid version between the first and second - SSHD. And yet, what is it?

It looks like the same simple screw, that is, it also works thanks to the plates and heads. Only they added flash memory to it, like in a solid-state drive.

How did you come to this decision?

To understand the cause-and-effect relationships, let’s look at the operating principle of the drive. When you give it a command with the keyboard and mouse, it first accesses the data in the first level cache. This is the area where the information you use most often is temporarily stored.

Depending on the HDD model, its volume varies between 8-64 MB. Catastrophically few, right? Therefore, the computer freezes (or rather, the screw itself freezes) if it suddenly does not find the necessary information in the cache and begins to select it from what it has in stock.

In order to prevent the computer from slowing down, we added a level 2 hard cache in the form of flash memory. Its volume can reach 8 GB. Better now, right? And although the additional cache has a lower speed than the main one, with a hybrid hard cache you are unlikely to have to worry about waiting for a response from the computer to your request.

After all, SSHD can add much more information to its temporary storage than HDD. True, there is no way to interfere in the election process: the drive itself decides what is more important to you.

For this, self-learning technology is used, which, from the first seconds of work, examines on the disk those files that have already been used several times, and if you reuse them, they will launch faster. That is, only the most frequently used files work quickly on such drives.

But the buffer size is known to be limited, therefore the disk will not process all your files faster (the files are replaced by others you use).

Advantages and Disadvantages

Like everything in our world, this device has pros and cons. Let's start with the good:

Works faster than the old screw by about 30%;
Costs less than SSD;
Flash memory and screw have a single housing.

The hybrid drive has only one drawback - a small cache size. But this is temporary, as technology develops. By the way, do not confuse the cache with memory intended for storing multimedia and other data - its volume can be calculated in terabytes.

Do you need a hybrid hard drive?

As you can see, when buying a hybrid propeller you can only win. But is it worth buying this hard one while the old one works flawlessly? The answer is yes if you want to speed up your computer.

I can say the same to those whose propeller has broken. I mean, you'll have to buy a new one anyway, so why not a hybrid? The price is not much more expensive than a regular disk, but it works much faster.

If you decide that you need a drive, when choosing, pay attention to the following main features:

Form factor - size.

Initially, these screws were intended only for mobile gadgets, so they were produced in a 2.5-inch form factor (size).

But manufacturers also took care of owners of desktop computers by releasing 3.5-inch devices.

Interface - a way to connect the drive to the motherboard. The data exchange speed also depends on this parameter. The most common now is SATA. The first and third generations of this bus are found in many computers. Do you have very old hardware? It may have an obsolete IDE interface.
Capacity. In this case, choose according to your personal needs.

My conclusion is this: since this disk generally works faster only with frequently used files, it would be more rational to buy it to install the OS on it. I just don’t see the point in using it for regular files.

That's all, friends, subscribe to the update and don't forget to bookmark the link to my blog.

Good luck with the upgrade.

A solid-state drive is an excellent thing in all respects, except for one thing - price.
It often happens that after purchasing a laptop, the owner thinks about an upgrade - he wants the machine to work faster. One of the bottlenecks is the speed of the drive. It would seem that the conclusion suggests itself - install an SSD and rejoice. But what about the accumulated data? Should I also buy a portable hard drive? Throw away the optical drive and shamanize a hard drive bay instead? All options are possible, each with its own inconveniences. But! There is another option that is not often mentioned - installing a hybrid drive - the price of hybrid drives is a little more expensive than regular drives, but their capacity is rather large, and the speed (as they say) is comparable to an SSD.

A beautiful representative of the hybrid family fell into my hands Seagate SSHD, capacity 1000GB (model ST1000LM014, there is also a thin version with a capacity of 500GB). Let's see how justified this upgrade option is.

0. Characteristics

For the curious, I hasten to immediately inform you of the characteristics of hybrid drives:

The test drive has 8GB of solid-state NAND memory and 64MB of cache.
Information is stored on two plates, respectively, 4 heads are used.
Thickness is standard for regular laptops, 9.5mm. For ultrabooks, a thin model with a capacity of 500GB is useful.

1. Appearance.

Supplied in a modest package, the hard drive looks no different from conventional drives.
Only the inscription SSHD can suggest an unusual device.

The microcircuits on the control board face the housing, which provides some protection from external influences. The control board is easily removed, on it we see a Seagate LSI control controller, a 64MB cache memory chip from Samsung, as well as an 8GB solid-state chip located next to the eASIC controller, which is responsible for working with the SSD department.

It's that simple: take a tricky controller, a piece of a solid-state drive and voila - the hybrid is ready!

2. Testing

I decided to check the operation of the drive in comparison with two obvious alternatives:
- a regular laptop hard drive with a capacity of 500GB
- OCZ Vertex 3 solid-state drive, 60 GB capacity
Let me remind you that a larger SSD will work faster than in the tests I presented.
I also note that the price of a 120GB SSD is on average comparable to the price of a 1TB SSHD.

Testing was carried out in two stages:
1. synthetic tests of read/write speed and access time
2. Hard drives with the cloned OS were installed one by one in the laptop, and the startup time of the OS and programs was measured.
It seemed to me that a simple set of synthetic tests was not enough, since to optimize the operation of the solid-state cache in Seagate drives, Adaptive Memory technology is used (I suspect that the tricky eASIC controller is responsible for its implementation). The essence of the technology is that the most frequently used data is cached on the SSD and access to it subsequently accelerates. You can read more about this technology on the Seagate website
Simple tests do not use any data, but simply check the physical properties of writing/reading, i.e. all the cunning mechanisms remain unused and are unlikely to bring tangible gains in terms of performance.
Therefore, it is the time indicators of application launches that seem to me to be the most objective.

So what happened...

2.1 Synthetic tests

Crystal Disk Mark

as ssd benchmark

Atto disk benchmark

Speed tests: CrystalDiskMark, Atto disk benchmark, as ssd benchmark give approximately the same picture
It is not surprising that the undisputed leader is the SSD, while the SSHD and HDD show approximately equal results in sequential read/write, but in tests of random read/write speed of small blocks, the SSHD shows better results, although compared to the results of the SSD this advantage does not seem to be significant.

PCMark 7

The PCMark7 test, when testing hard drives, acts a little smarter and checks not only the write/read speed, but also the capabilities of real operation, simulating the operation of real applications.

The undisputed leader remains the SSD, but the advantage of a hybrid drive suddenly becomes very noticeable. When it comes to launching and running applications, the SSHD performs excellently, far outperforming a traditional drive.

2.2 Launching applications

The startup time of the OS (from the POST screen to the launch of the Calculator program in startup) and programs was measured using a stopwatch. The measurements were carried out 5 times, the result is the arithmetic mean.

In real work, the hybrid drive performs excellently. I will also note that the final diagram does not quite objectively describe the operation of the SSHD, since due to the adaptive memory mechanism, the startup time decreases each time until it reaches the optimal mode. So, the first OS restart took 107 seconds, while the fifth measurement showed 58 seconds. The final boot time reached a stable 36 seconds, which in practice is not very different from the readings of the solid-state drive.
The loading speed of applications is also indicative.

3. Summary

To summarize, I would like to describe my impressions. When I first tried to work on a PC with an SSD, I was impressed by the speed of operation, launching applications, and the overall responsiveness of the system. After this experience, working with HDD-based systems is a real pain, the OS takes an unbearably long time to load, the system seems thoughtful and unresponsive. Based on the results of working with the hybrid drive, it became clear that this is a real alternative to SSD. The system, of course, is a little less responsive, but in general there is no such agony as with an HDD. The advantage of this compromise solution is the low price per GB of volume (compared to SSD), since for the same money you can buy, for example, either a 120GB SSD or 8 times more voluminous, 1TB SSHD
Thus, the hybrid has absorbed both the best advantages of both types, as well as largely insignificant disadvantages.

High operating speed (compared to traditional drives)
+ Low price (compared to solid-state drives)

Operating speed is slower than SSD
- The mechanics are in place - the pancakes are spinning, the heads are scouring.

Conclusion: A hybrid drive is an excellent compromise solution for a home laptop.

January 19, 2014 at 5:07 pm

Hybrid drives SSHD - what kind of bird?

King Servers Blog

In our work we often have to deal with a variety of information storage devices, including hard drives and solid-state storage devices. At the same time, sometimes you come across quite unusual devices that are not common everywhere. For example, SSHD are hybrid hard drives. There are probably people on Habré who are well acquainted with this type of information storage device, but there are also those who have not even heard of such “hybrids”.

So, hybrid hard drives, first of all, are a compromise solution that allows you to both increase the overall performance of the system in which they are installed and reduce the price of such a system.

After all, despite their widespread use, solid-state drives are still quite expensive, and it is unlikely that there will come a time soon when the price of such drives will drop significantly.

Conventional hard drives are inexpensive for the most part, but their performance is limited, and you cannot “jump” above a certain limit. That's why hybrid hard drives appeared. SSHD appeared a few years ago, and at first they were pure exoticism, which few people took seriously (and few knew about them). The main advantage of a hybrid hard drive is that it increases the overall performance of the system in which they are installed, using only one drive bay (rather than two, if you use both an SSD and a regular hard drive). Now there are models of “hybrids” of small sizes, for example, with a thickness of only 7 mm (this is the model ST500LM000 from Seagate), which allows you to install such drives in netbooks/ultrabooks.

The operating principle of SSHD is based on caching the most frequently used data using flash memory, that is, the SSD part of the “hybrid”. Already when the operating system is launched for the first time on a laptop/PC with a “hybrid”, the files that the operating system needs to load are placed in the non-volatile part of the SSHD memory. As a result, the OS startup speed increases, and quite significantly.

The hybrid drive, by the way, shows almost similar file transfer speed results compared to conventional hard drives. But the difference in the operation of different types of devices becomes very noticeable when comparing file access time (Access Time). For example, if you take a Seagate ST500LT032 drive with a capacity of 500 GB and compare it with the “hybrid” ST500LM000 of the same capacity, then the file access speed will be 24.2 and 0.3 ms.

As for the maximum speed of the interface, the difference is no longer several times, but 15%. In the first case, 101 MB/s, in the second - 115 MB/s.

There are also disadvantages, and first of all, it is the inability to fit all critical data on the SSD part of an SSHD disk. Typically, an SSD in a “hybrid” is installed with a capacity of 8 GB, sometimes more (for example, models with 32 GB of flash memory are not uncommon), but then such a drive will be more expensive.

The price of “hybrids” is only slightly higher than that of conventional hard drives. If we take the models already mentioned above, then the price of the Seagate Laptop Thin SSHD ST500LM000 is $73-75, and the Seagate ST500LT032 is about $50.

So, if you want to increase the OS loading speed, as well as the overall performance of your laptop/desktop PC, we recommend using “hybrids”. Well, that's if saving money is important to you. If not, then you should use SSD and regular hard drives separately.

Why choose a hybrid hard drive over an SSD
A hybrid hard drive combines the performance of a solid-state drive with the capacity of a mechanical drive. They are larger than SSDs and faster than a simple hard drive.
It is sometimes referred to as a solid-state hybrid drive (SSHD). The drive automatically caches data into solid-state storage for faster file access.
Solid state drives are much faster than mechanical drives. Prices have dropped noticeably, so it makes sense to upgrade to an SSD. But even cheaper drives are less capacious. 1 GB of solid state drive costs $0.58, and 1 GB of mechanical drive costs $0.06. An affordable solid-state drive has a maximum capacity of 256 GB, while a mechanical drive has a capacity of 2 or 3 TB. Mechanical drives are slow, but have enormous capacity at an extremely low cost per gigabyte.
To take advantage of both types of drives, many people equip their computers with both solid-state and mechanical drives. The solid state drive is used for system files and programs that need speed. A large mechanical disk is used for long-term storage of files that do not require particularly quick access, such as a collection of films. This requires installing both drives into the computer and choosing which programs and files to put on each drive. You have to move files to another drive yourself. Moving a program to another disk means deleting it and reinstalling it in another location.
A hybrid drive consists of a magnetic disk and a solid-state drive with the volume of a small solid-state drive. This disk appears to the operating system as a single disk. You are not responsible for which files go to the mechanical drive and which to the solid state. The drive's firmware determines what makes it onto the solid-state drive and what doesn't.
The SSD part of the disk serves as a “cache” - files that are often accessed - files of the operating system and programs, the firmware is stored in the SSD drive. The cache is stored in non-volatile semiconductor solid-state memory, surviving reboots and thereby speeding up the boot procedure.
System and program files are accessed at the speed of a solid-state drive, while providing magnetic disk capacity for other files. The drive handles this on its own—you don't have to move files back and forth or decide what goes where.
Most hybrid drives have a small SSD storage capacity. Some of them have 1 TB of mechanical capacity and only 8 GB of semiconductor memory. 8 GB is enough to store system and program files, but this volume is not comparable to 128 or 256 GB, which can accommodate all system and program files.
Apple's Fusion Drive is also a hybrid and is equipped with a magnetic capacity of 1 to 3 TB along with 128 GB of solid-state memory.
Hybrid drives are cheaper than solid-state drives because they contain less solid-state memory. A 2TB hybrid drive with 8GB of cache is more expensive than a regular 2TB mechanical drive, but cheaper than a 256GB SSD, which has even less free space.
A major advantage is that the hybrid drive is a single physical drive. If your laptop only has room for one drive, but you need the speed of a solid-state drive and the capacity of a mechanical drive, then a hybrid drive is the best solution.
It's all about price and capacity. If magnetic and solid-state drives were the same in cost, then hybrid drives would not be needed at all. Solid state drives would be better in every way.
Hybrid drive is slow when first used. When it first starts working, caching has not yet been done, which means that the disk will be just as slow as a classic magnetic one. As you use it, the drive will learn which files to cache and speed will gradually increase.
It's up to you to choose which drive to use, but our team prefers a hybrid drive with at least 32GB of solid-state memory.

An article about the advantages and disadvantages of hybrid hard drives that combine the strengths of HDD and SSD drives

Over the past ten years or so, solid state drives (SSDs) have gained popularity in the IT world. First, they have made their way into laptops and mobile devices with their small form factor and lack of moving parts. Now they are making their way into enterprise storage systems. Using the same flash memory found in USB drives, mobile phones and SD cards, they offer a long list of advantages over their electromechanical counterparts, solid-state hard drives. Computer SSD drives have no moving parts, are more resistant to shock and other forms of physical damage, and are lightning fast in their speed of reading and writing data.

HDD storage capacity has grown quite consistently - nowadays, massive 3TB and 4TB drives are within reach, and even 8TB and 10TB giants have made their way to the market. Hard drives reach speeds of up to 15,000 rpm. They are noisier, hotter, and require more power than their flash counterparts.

So why can't we ditch our hard drives and solid state drives? The answer is simple: the cost of one gigabyte of an SSD drive is noticeably more expensive. As of January 2015, a 1 TB hard drive can cost around $50, while the equivalent cost for an SSD is around $380 - $400.

In 2010, a number of manufacturers, starting with Seagate and Samsung, began introducing a third option in the drive world in an attempt to bridge the price and performance gap between HDDs and SSDs by offering a hybrid option. Since then, Western Digital and Toshiba have also started making hybrid drives. The hybrid drive provides some of the best features of both technologies, combining the speed of an SSD with the cost efficiency of an electromechanical HDD.

How does a computer's hybrid hard drive work?

The basis of a hybrid hard drive is the combination of a cache with rotating electromagnetic plates of a solid-state HDD. A solid-state hybrid drive (SSHD) typically consists of 8, 16 or 32 GB of flash capacity and a larger HDD for storing some of the data. The idea is that "hot data" should be accessible quickly or frequently (eg by the operating system). This data can be cached on the SSD and as a result is retrieved faster than if it were stored on the platters themselves. It's the same principle as installing an HDD and SSD on a desktop machine, i.e. a dual drive and hybrid solution, except that the performance optimizations are built into the firmware and adapt to storage needs. These adaptive or self-learning optimization techniques eliminate the need to manually move files/applications to the appropriate hard drives.

There are currently two modes of operation for all hybrid hard drives, or SSHDs. First, the optimized mode itself, or stand-alone mode, which determines the “hot” and “cold” data to be written to the disk. For the host machine, the drive does not feature traditional internal storage.

Another SSHD mode is host optimized mode, or anchor host mode. In this format, the machine owner designates which data is hot and cold using its operating system, device drivers, and in some cases, software. The host machine regularly sends designations to the drive via the SATA interface and instructs the drive how to store the data.

Benefits of hybrid disk storage

The key benefit of using a hybrid storage device is increased performance with high storage headroom, without a significant increase in cost (around $100 for 1TB SSHD), while maintaining high potential. SSHDs have the capacity of a computer's hard drive with increased seek speeds for cached data on an HDD solid-state hard drive—at a fraction of the cost of an SSD.

In addition, a hybrid hard drive provides the computer with faster access to critical data, and there are other benefits associated with flash memory, which is also used on SSHDs. For example, if calibration is done correctly, you can reduce stress and wear on the drive, resulting in a longer lifespan than traditional solid-state hard drives.

Disadvantages of Hybrid Hard Drives

Although hybrid drives are a great solution, they are not perfect. Retrieving data from your hard drive is as fast as traditional solid state HDDs. Hybrid drives are still vulnerable to physical damage, and you won't benefit from the silence of an SSD.

Since we are experts in the field of data recovery, we must discuss the implications of data recovery under hybrid storage. The good news is that the solid state portion of an SSHD is used primarily as a cache or for storing operating system files, and you are unlikely to lose data on that portion of the drive. If you happen to lose data from the solid-state area of a hybrid drive, recovery presents its own challenges, such as alternative methods of organizing the data.

All in all, hybrid drives have a lot to offer both consumers and business users seeking the speed of an SSD while still looking for the cost per gigabyte of a hard drive. This is a great way to bridge the gap between a solid state HDD and a fast SSD.