Is there Notable Performance difference between mechanical drives and hybrid drives

[lalith]

If it is , Will it be effective for Gaming too or just for small applications?

[kalniel]

If it is , Will it be effective for Gaming too or just for small applications?

Hard drives don't affect the typical performance measures for gaming (ie fps) in the slightest.

If your game was small enough to fit in the SSD portion of a hybrid drive, and that was what you regularly used it for, then loading time might be quicker, though in that case just getting an SSD would be preferable so you could ensure the game data is always loaded quickly.

[Biscuit]

There is a notable difference for the files that are regularly used, which is why i have been using them for the last few years, but the difference is not enough for me to honestly recommend them to other people.
Money is better spent on a seperate SSD where the important files and application go, then a large capacity spinner for everything else.

[Pob255]

Hybrid drives are great in laptops for fast boot up and/or coming out of hibernation/sleep mode times, for games or desktops not really.
In a laptop when you're more than likely limited to a single drive a hybrid drive is very nice, in a desktop where you're not limited to a single drive, an ssd + hdd is generally a better option.

[Biscuit]

Hybrid drives are great in laptops for fast boot up and/or coming out of hibernation/sleep mode times, for games or desktops not really.
In a laptop when you're more than likely limited to a single drive a hybrid drive is very nice, in a desktop where you're not limited to a single drive, an ssd + hdd is generally a better option.

I'd go along with this, excecpt to say that in a laptop, if you can afford a high capacity SSD, or you can do without the extra space, or if you can put up with carrying around an external (or a bunch of key drives), the speed will outperform a hybrid in all circumstances and give you an overall better experience... This is my opinion, YMMV of course.

[watercooled]

Agreed with the above comments really. Hybrid drives have to figure out what to put in the relatively small (e.g. 8GB for a 2TB Seagate drive) SSD cache of the drive, and while they can perform well for some tasks, I'm not sure if gaming is one of them.

Games tend to involve loading huge files from hard drives, and the usage pattern probably isn't an ideal workload for a hybrid drive. E.g. say you're playing through a campaign, you might only need to load the bits for each level once or twice (assuming they're not just cached in RAM anyway after the first time), so they will likely be read from the disk itself rather than the cache. And even if the caching algorithm then decides to flush some space and hold onto the new level data, you'll be on to loading the next level, again from the mechanical disk.

I stand to be corrected, but until then I wouldn't be recommending one for storing games. General OS use on the other hand, I've heard they can be good, but perhaps workload-dependent for reasons similar to the above. Personally, I'd rather know what is stored where and be able to assign it myself with separate drives.

Anyway, the difference an SSD makes to load times differs from game to game, some being more IO-bound than others.

[kammak743]

In gaming it will not directly effect your frame rate but may improve other things.
A hybrid drive is good for a laptop but if you have room for 2 drives get a SSD and a HDD

[lalith]

Thanks guys for helping me out.
My next related question
http://forums.hexus.net/pc-hardware-...ml#post3420563

[kalniel]

If you don't have a capacity or redundancy requirement (ie you have a choice) then one SSD every time.

[HalloweenJack]

if your playing an MMO say , and it loads on the fly (saying when changing zones) then you`ll get back in `faster`. but no it wont increase frame rate

[krazy_olie]

The problem with the hhybrid drives they're selling at the moment is that the cache they put on is too small. It will improve things for general windows/browsing but it can't fit much else in there.

For a short while you could get cache drives with dataplex caching software of decent sizes. I found it helped a lot as it seemed to speed up windows and game loading times.

There is still an option of windows srt (I think), chuck in a small drive and it does something simillar

[Biscuit]

The problem with the hhybrid drives they're selling at the moment is that the cache they put on is too small. It will improve things for general windows/browsing but it can't fit much else in there.

For a short while you could get cache drives with dataplex caching software of decent sizes. I found it helped a lot as it seemed to speed up windows and game loading times.

There is still an option of windows srt (I think), chuck in a small drive and it does something simillar

There is also Intel Smart Response/Rapid Storage

http://www.intel.co.uk/content/www/u...echnology.html

[krazy_olie]

There is also Intel Smart Response/Rapid Storage

http://www.intel.co.uk/content/www/u...echnology.html

yep, in the post I called it Windows srt, not intel. my bad!
Blaming it on the whole wintel thing...

[Biscuit]

yep, in the post I called it Windows srt, not intel. my bad!
Blaming it on the whole wintel thing...

I thought you were talking about something I wasnt aware of