4TB SSHD with 8GB SSD cache, or 3-4 1TB HDDS in RAID

[EndGamerGuy]

I am considering buying one of the options I listed above in the title and was wondering if 1 SSHD would give better performance than a few HDDS in RAID 0?

 

[capt_taco]

First, I would never recommend RAID0 with that many drives - if one goes, you lose everything, so the more drives you add, the more you increase the risk. I'd only use it with two drives where there is NOTHING essential that could be lost.

So, go with the other option for sure.

 

[PsyKhiqZero]

No matter how many HDD's you RAID together, they still have their respective seek times to contend with. A SSD's greatest advantage is it's near zero seek time. With that said as a boot drive or dedicated gaming drive a hybrid would be better. But as recording drive a single hdd or at most a 2 disk raid zero hdd array is better.

 

[jitpublisher]

What do you plan on doing with this machine? Most people never need all the bandwidth, its the instant access time of the SSD that makes it so attractive. If you do need bandwidth, its very likely the access times are not important. So, what are you intentions for this machine?

 

[EndGamerGuy]

My intentions for this rig is Gaming, downloading, streaming online content, maybe recording gameplay, and some editing and multimedia software. I am planning on buying a 1TB SSD for all my Steam games, a 120GB SSD for Windows OS disk, and the current drive setup in question is for downloads, general storage and for saving my recordings after using the OS drive to record them.

 

[capt_taco]

If it's only for mass storage and you have SSDs for everything else, I'd just use a regular hard drive.

A hybrid is basically just a hard drive with a small cache for commonly loaded files. So it'll mostly help with OS boot times and load times for a few programs. For mass storage of data, it'll just work like a regular hard drive.