Seagate SSHD - The Best of Both worlds

Grauniad · August 30, 2013, 05:54:43 PM

The Seagate SSHD (Solid State Hybrid Drive) is a hard drive with an on-board SSD. THey initially started this as a laptop drive providing performance and capacity and are now extending the range into desktop hard drives with both 1 and 2TB models available as of now.

As I mentioned earlier, installing an SSD as one's primary boot drive is nice and startup is blazing fast, but it does require an additional hard drive with all the encumbrance of managing data over multiple drives.The SSHD integrates a small, chaching SSD in the same form factor as the normal rotating hard drive and uses adaptive technology to cache the most-frequent used data on the SSD. Over time, as usage patterns change, the cached data will also adjust.

I may definitely look into this if I build a new computer. The 750 GB laptop SSHD I have has been working well for over a year now.

knucracker · August 31, 2013, 10:58:51 AM

That's very interesting... and I'm curious to see benchmarks on how it performs and what the MTBF is.

Grauniad · August 31, 2013, 12:46:59 PM

Some benchmarks here: http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_sshd_thin_review_gen3_500gb_st500lm000

knucracker · August 31, 2013, 01:26:09 PM

That's good, as HD's go. It looks like this thing might make a really nice main drive in a system (where the OS is installed as well as the applications). You have the large capacity, and the SSD cache will make booting and starting main apps fast. For a work horse system (development with big projects, recording hi res video, etc.), a second drive that is a straight SSD might still be called for.

What I would like is a device that has lots of RAM (like 128G), a built in battery, and a SSD for persistent storage. In other words, a RAM drive that persists to the SSD on shutdown or power failure, and loads from SSD on startup. You can do this with ram drive software, with a UPS, and with faith your OS doesn't blue screen. But a 'device' could take care of this at a hardware level, separate from the OS.

Grauniad · August 31, 2013, 01:36:44 PM

Your assessment is absolutely correct. The underlying hard drive, at least for the laptop version, is a 4300 rpm drive - quieter, cooler less prone to failure, and of course easier to make and with a much better MTBF. It does not make a great destination for a stream of data such as video recording. Anything that will run over the cache capacity is going to mess with your drive.

So looking back here at other posts I've made, this drive can take the place of the main workhorse drive and SSD, and then you can put one or mode SSDs in simply as work drives to target compiles and video capture and post-processing. If the latter fail, no sweat, you don't lose much. If the former fail, well the SSD fails back to the hard drive and the hard drive should (and this is where I call on Murphy's law) show it in SMART long before you lose data.

As for your RAM drive, look at a PCIE Flash drive. Smaller capacities are available - MadMag has one or two in his build.

Blaze · August 31, 2013, 09:49:08 PM

I'm often recording and I have a normal hard drive, so when I go to build a new computer I should look into an SSD solely for recording?

Grauniad · September 01, 2013, 03:51:25 AM

I don't think that would be the best use of this type of drive. The underlying mechanical drive is much slower than a standard drive and it relies on the SSD component to maintain performance. Writing a stream of data to it will not benefit from the SSD since the data is not cached.

Edit: I reviewed the specifications again. While the laptop SSHDs had 5,400 rpm mechanical drives, the desktop has the more common and faster 7,200 rpm drive.

Blaze · September 02, 2013, 01:51:32 AM

Quote from: Grauniad on September 01, 2013, 03:51:25 AM
I don't think that would be the best use of this type of drive. The underlying mechanical drive is much slower than a standard drive and it relies on the SSD component to maintain performance. Writing a stream of data to it will not benefit from the SSD since the data is not cached.

I'm talking about a completely separate SSD drive exclusively for recording to.
If I got this it'd be my main drive that I'd have the OS and other main applications in.

Grauniad · September 02, 2013, 02:11:27 AM

Oh yea, In another thread here I speculated taht a completely separate SSD drive would be a great way to do video capture and production. Virgil has started doing that when he installed his SSD, but unfortunately his system was so old that he could not make full advantage of the incredible speed of SSDs.

Blaze · September 02, 2013, 03:31:50 PM

Quote from: Grauniad on September 02, 2013, 02:11:27 AM
Oh yea, In another thread here I speculated taht a completely separate SSD drive would be a great way to do video capture and production. Virgil has started doing that when he installed his SSD, but unfortunately his system was so old that he could not make full advantage of the incredible speed of SSDs.

Cool, I'll keep this in mind when I do a new build when I finally get around to getting a job.
Probably next year, right now I'm enjoying massive amounts of free time to do whatever while being home alone from seven in the morning to three in the afternoon. :D

Hopefully I'll pull together a system that can take full advantage of it.
Honestly I'll probably come back here and make a thread when I start looking around.