Hybrid Drives: Should you buy them?

Hybrid drives or SSHD claim to give the performance of an SSD at prices similar to HDD. Solid State Hybrid Drives usually contain a flash storage or caching part for the Hard drive storage inside making it a bit faster than traditional HDD.
SSHD are primarily the same as HDD in terms of power consumption and noise generated. SShd's are great for budget builders who can't afford the best SSD's out there as SSHD's cost just a little more than HDD's and a lot lesser than SSD's. SSHD's do have better boot times and app launch times, but it won't be able to compete with the performance of an actual SSD. The best thing to do would be to buy the smallest SSD available and use it as a boot drive and for app installations and using a traditional HDD for Data Storage. This way one can get the best of both worlds. What do you think about SSHD? Is it worth the money that you pay for it?

 

Not really. For a while, they were a nice compromise and transition between traditional magnetic drives and solid state drives before the prices were in a range to where SSD drives were affordable and practical to sell to the public as a viable contender to current storage technology. Now that the cell storage technology has advanced considerably and the storage capacities are increasing while the price tag on them is decreasing, having a hybrid drive no longer makes sense when you can just buy an SSD now instead.

The issue not commonly discussed about hybrid drives too is that the storage area that is solid state is limited and burns out way more quickly than current SSD drives would. The more you write to that very small area on them, the more that area is going to get smaller until you're left with either a drive that is unusable, or a drive that still performs but bypasses any advantages given from the hybrid part and now runs just as a normal magnetic drive or slower.

My advice would be to just get an SSD for the size of drive you need and the speed it can handle on the bus and controller you're using (SATA I, II, III).

 

SSDs are certainly far superior, but I think there are plenty of occasions where SSHDs may be useful. Considering they're only a tiny bit more expensive than a mechanical drive (in the UK at least), it may make sense for a budget laptop where high storage capacity is required. On a desktop, you can often have the best of both worlds by installing a smaller SSD for the OS and a mechanical drive for storage.