Can someone explain Hybrid SSDs in words that my dad could understand ?

[g8ina]

Im confused.

Yeah yeah yeah, I know, it's easily done...

But really, can anyone explain these beasties to me ?

" SSHDs fuse the lightning speed of SSD with the high capacity of a hard drive" - How ?

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/500gb...roductId=73091

[Jonj1611]

Basically its like having a really large cache on a traditional hard drive, whatever is used the most is moved to the SSD.

Though to Windows/Linux or whatever it would just appear as one drive. The data moves between the SSD & HDD in the background.

[g8ina]

Ahhh, now I get it. Thanks Jon !!

I was wondering what the 6-8GB reference in a 500GB drive was

[scaryjim]

If you understand how hard drives (and SSDs, come to that) use a small amount of RAM to speed up access, it's a bit like that, but with flash memory. You get a small flash memory cache - usually around 8GB - and commonly used files (or just segments of them) get copied into the flash memory. Any access to those files/segments will be very fast, as they're hosted on the "SSD" part of the drive. I think most of them also use the flash memory as a write-through cache, so most disk writes go onto the SSD portion first (which again, should be a lot faster than writing directly to the HDD).

The performance is nowhere near that of a decent SSD, but it's usually a reasonable upgrade from a normal HDD, and you don't have to sacrifice disk capacity.

[Kumagoro]

As far as I know Seagate and Toshiba ones do not use the ssd for writes. They are basically a read cache. So they are good for loading Windows and programs and that's about it.

The cache ssd's like San disks one, cache the reads and writes but make use of software in Windows.

In my opinion they are good for games consoles or laptops where you can't have an msata ssd

[suedenim]

From my own experience with them - waste of money. I was using the machine for Visual Studio primarily on Win 7 and experienced no discernible speed up even with my browser usage, same went for my colleagues too.