WD demonstrates world's fastest 4TB SSHD drive

[HEXUS]

Aims to bring the best performance and GB-per-dollar solutions to market.

Read more.

[shaithis]

I was looking at that graph for ages thinking "BS!", until I realised that the Y-axis is GB/$ not GB/s! Looking at the various numbers for each type, I can only guess that the x-axis is "Mbps"

As always, graphs created by marketing are useless.

[risapylsa]

So you'd technically be getting 1.128 TB of storage. What would the advantages be to getting this over a dedicated SSD and a HDD?

[shaithis]

So you'd technically be getting 1.128 TB of storage. What would the advantages be to getting this over a dedicated SSD and a HDD?

Only advantage I can see is if you have 1 drive bay. Intel boards you can use an SSD as a cache for 1 or more hard drives....and TBH, I personally think hybrid drives are useless anyway. Manage it yourself rather than hoping/waiting for the drives algorithm to put the data you want to load fast on the SSD.

[crossy]

I personally think hybrid drives are useless anyway. Manage it yourself rather than hoping/waiting for the drives algorithm to put the data you want to load fast on the SSD.

I'm going to agree and disagree with you on this, (oh, and you're correct - WD's hybrids are probably a good idea for single drive bay laptops and/or ultrabooks). The way WD have implemented their SSHDs, with a schizophrenic drive appearing as two separate devices, is pretty dumb apart from that laptop use-case. And I'm going to agree that hoping that your (external) software knows enough to put the right stuff on the fast partition is a bit daft compared to explicitly saying "put OS on SSD, everything else on HDD".

On the other hand, I've got a Seagate SSHD where the SSD part is merely used as a very large, persistent cache for frequently-used data. It's a single drive and the internal drive electronics handle all the decisions, and it really doesn't care if it's using Linux, Windows, MacOSX, etc - it's just data as far as the drive's concerned. Unlike the WD one, which was Windows-only last time I looked, and needed a special driver.

I replaced a shockingly-badly performing WD Black user-data drive with my Seagate SSHD and the login-to-usable times went down dramatically after about a day, and they've stayed there ever since. Okay, they're not as good as moving my data to "proper" SSD, but the price of those proper drives was prohibitive at the time.

[99x]

I was looking at that graph for ages thinking "BS!", until I realised that the Y-axis is GB/$ not GB/s! Looking at the various numbers for each type, I can only guess that the x-axis is "Mbps"

As always, graphs created by marketing are useless.

"PCMark8 benchmark score of 4459". You can see how the prototype performed in PCMark8 Storage tests compared with other types of drives below."

[plexabit]

I see this drive idea getting huge usage in the thin-and-light gaming department. For example, Lenovo (for some reason) doesn't have an mSATA slot on the y50, so a hybrid 1TB/128GB SSD would be ideal.

SOooo...basically this drive:

http://store.westerndigital.com/stor...oryID.67686200

[directhex]

WD's hybrids are probably a good idea for single drive bay laptops and/or ultrabooks[/i]). The way WD have implemented their SSHDs, with a schizophrenic drive appearing as two separate devices, is pretty dumb apart from that laptop use-case.

If only.

It's implemented with a schizophrenic drive appearing as one 1.128T drive - but if you make a partition larger than 128G at the start of it, all data becomes corrupt and lost.

The Windows-only driver, which you need to remember to use at install-time, hides the 128G part.

[techJC]

That's technology!
#WDabsolutely

[crossy]

It's implemented with a schizophrenic drive appearing as one 1.128T drive - but if you make a partition larger than 128G at the start of it, all data becomes corrupt and lost. The Windows-only driver, which you need to remember to use at install-time, hides the 128G part.

Thanks for that info, sounds even worse than I'd read.

As I said, that's why I prefer the Seagate solution, it's not two-drives-in-one-package, instead it's a persistently-cached HDD - just plug in and forget about it. I just wish though that Seagate did an improved model with much larger NAND areas, the current 8GB is a bit on the small side. To my novice view if you can get a 128GB USB stick for about £40 then why can't the Seagate SSHD 4TB model come with 128GB of Flash? Heck, my local supermarket sells a 32GB stick for just over a tenner, so if Seagate did a 2TB drive with that 32GB Flash then I'd upgrade now.