Hybrid drives

When they launched the first SSD drives they were very expensive so to compensate their high price they ended up creating the hybrid drive. It was a regular drive with a added SSD drive onto it. The reason they did this was so that you could install your OS onto the SSD and keep the rest of your information on the regular drive.
The other day I went into a computer store and noticed that none of the computers had these drives, they either had HDD or SSD drives.
Is there a reason they didn't take off that I don't know about?

 

The original price difference was quite a lot at the time.

There was little publicity regarding the drives.

Amazon and, others are still selling them, and the prices are coming down.

 

I don't know anything about hybrid drives. Actually, I have never come across with this terminology. Can you explain what exactly is hybrid drive. I am also confused about HDD and SSD drives. Please explain these things.

 

A standard hard drive is a purely magnetic one (at least, until these past few years). HDD is an abbreviation for hard disk drive, but you'll see people using that at times to make references to the older hard drives from before. SSD drives are solid state drives where there are no magnetic or moving parts; they are more shock resistant, and are many, many times faster than even the fastest magnetic drives because they work coser to the speed of your ram than not (they are not quite as fast as your system ram, but are several hundreds to thousands of times faster than magnetic drives even still, depending on what kind of solid state drive we're talking aout, NAND technology in it, and other considerations).

The hybrid drives were supposed to be a temporary way to market both kinds of drives to transition people to SSDs, while the rest of the market was able to get production of pure SSD drives up enough for the price to come down in mass quantities for all other consumers. They could have produced enough even then, but corporatism and consumerism have pricing trends which manufacturers always tend to follow. As such, they wanted to play out the hybrid drive sales as long as they could, and they still try to sell them even though they didn't market them quite like they expected.

A true SSD drive is always better than a magnetic drive when it comes to speed and performance for you, but the price is only recently starting to be on the level of magnetic drives. For the longest time, even an SSD drive with half the size of another magnetic drive cost the same or double the amount of money.

The hybrid drives were a way to cheaply store the bulk of a user's data on the slower magnetic portion, while placing the most routinely called programs and data on the very small SSD part of the hybrid drive.

It did for hard drives what Superfetch attempts to do for Windows 7 and after, by placing the most frequently used things in a "common" area, while the least used are stored on the magnetic drive as usual, and only buffered to the SSD area when needed.

There are different variations of hybrid drives though, to where some could be used stand-alone as two separate partitions that you could control, while others were fully integrated and the SSD prefetch was used directly in the hardware. The problem with the second version (and the first in some instances) is that the SSD drives were very small, and the cell technology was not as good as it is now. The smaller the area you have to store data on an SSD, the more frequently cells will be written to and read from. Reading from cels isn't the issue, but writing to them constantly is.

When those cells in fewer areas get worn out, two things happen. Either 1) The drive becomes like a magnetic drive, bypassing the SSD area once it is worn out or can no longer be used, or 2) cannot be initialized if the designated SSD hardware was used in a proprietary way with managing the area of a hard drive with an overlay that emulated the jump location for a magnetic boot sector, which means that having or emuating a MFT overtop of it to manage a file system would no longer be possible. In short, on the proprietary drives, if that happened then you either had to physically replace the SSD portion (not always possible depending on implementation) or the drive would no longer be useable. Most of the hybrid drives were like #1, but some were like #2 and quickly disapeared from the market (I hope). I haven't seen them for several years, but they may still be out there.

I don't really see a reason to get a hybrid drive at all since SSD prices have become more reasonable and the storage space has increased to where it's worth it to upgrade. SSD data recovery and storage is done differently than magnetic drive mediums, so it still has a place (if you need better chances of recovery from a magnetic medium, or you need to store data very cheaply in a more traditional way). But for most consumers and everyday computer users, it would behoove you to have an SSD for speed and performance.

I cut a few small corners to explain this more easily, but I hope that it helps for anyone wanting to understand the differences on any level.

 

Hmm...I haven't seen hybrid drives in a long time either. As already mentioned, they just didn't have the market once the SSDs actually became affordable for the masses. They were just to help people understand that SSDs could be a thing someday and today they are that thing.

 

Very good explanation @IBMPC8088, now it makes sense why it isn't so popular. It is still possible to have two drivers connected to a computer (mainly desktops) one SSD and another HDD, and have the same performance with out the bad side effects, but as you have said the price of SSD drives has dropped to the point that it can be viable to do the upgrade to SSD.

 

Yes, thanks for the explanation. I was thinking that maybe hardware incompatibility and Windows 10 coming out -- the big box stores might have not wanted to risk having a meltdown and lots of returns.

 

I agree that SSD may be the thing now. In fact, I am doing a research on the cost and quality of the SSD but my main focus is on the lifespan. As I had posted in another thread, the hard drive has a lifespan of 2 years according to a speaker in one seminar that I had attended (of course the number comes with some complications). But with SSD having no mechanical movement like the hard drive, I guess it is the state of the art storage.

 

Yeah. Well, even 2 years was a bit short, I haven't had too many hard drives fail. So, even if people say that the average is 2 or 4 or 8 years, most of the drives that I have owned have never failed. Also, HGST is the drive that is most reliable.

SSDs definitely have the advantage over mechanical drives, but the price is also something to consider since you can get 2 TB of data storage using a traditional HD for cheap.

 

I can't believe that it has such a short life span, can it really be that short. I have hard drives that are 10 years old and they are still working without any problems. Their capacity is a bit small but I wouldn't be surprised that they have another 10 years in them.

 

In actual use, the lifespan of hard drive is certainly more than that 2 years. We also have drives that old like yours. Maybe that 2-year lifespan is just a precaution. But I suspect that if a hard drive is dormant for 2 years then you will have a problem. That's why we access the archive disk drives regularly, at least once a month just to see if it's working all right.

 

It would have to be one of the older SSD drives with fewer cells, no TRIM, or a user that isn't aware they shouldn't be defragging and constantly writing over all of those cells repeatedly to have only an average of 2 year life span.

Even some of the older SSD drives I have that are (as far as I feel) not the safest to store data on anymore because of their age...they are still working with over 70% readable and writeable cells, and the marker areas for worn out cells are noted by the system so it doesn't write to those areas anymore if the reliability for save or recall cannot be assured as before.

It would be very likely for some of the earliest solid state drives to only have that long, but not so much for the newest ones since 2010. The drives released commercially in 2012 were even better than the ones from 2010 with error correction, built-in TRIM features in hardware even if not in the software, and wear-leveling advances to make sure you didn't have to manage that yourself between reading and writing data manually. It's come a long way, and continues to improve. Granted, Corsair, Sandisk, PNY, and others warranty it for 2 or 3 years only, but that's the absolute minimum amount of time the drive should be good for, even if consumers go wild on it and start reading and writing to the drive excessively by means they shouldn't.

It should last you a minimum of 3 years usually, but it will last you much longer like a regular magnetic hard drive does if you take care of it and use it correctly without trying to wear it out on purpose. I stil use both types of drives for different purposes, but to date, I've had more magnetic drives give out on me (even new ones only a few months old) justifiably and not than SSD drives which (both newer and older ones) didn't buckle under the stress because it could get data to and from the controller faster to stay ahead of program and user requests.

On average, you should be able to reasonably expect about 4 to 6 years out of one, and a midway of about 5 years. But just like any drive you have, you'll always want to make sure that you back up and save the data in advance before you let it get to that point where you wish you would have.

 

I think a laptop or a PC with a small SSD for the OS (64GB) and a big HDD (1TB) is also qualified for the term hybrid. I have seen many advertisements stating hybrid drives like that.
So if any manufacturer still uses hybrid, then it doesn't mean it is using the older SSD and all that blah blah, but it only means that it has a mechanical drive + SSD

 

That is a good idea, that certainly will keep them in good conditions. Where I'm from all the electronic products have to have a guarantee of at least 2 years. Could it be that?

 

I'm really not sure if that 2-year lifespan of the hard drive is the guarantee. But maybe it is because our oldest drive that is still running is more than 10 years old already. That's the problem with me, when the tech says so, I try to remember and follow just to avoid probable disasters. So maybe if the SSD becomes cheaper in price, and I know it will sooner or later, the hard drive will be obsoleted just like what the CD did to the diskettes.

 

I think it will, or at least everything seems to points to that direction, the main problem you still have with SSD drives is their small capacity. If they can increase it, the drives with a lower capacity will quickly become cheaper.