Bought a Firecuda 2TB SSHD I have some questions I would like clarified.

[fieryhellz]

I not long just ordered a Firecuda 2TB SSHD and I'm getting various opinions from friends and now I'm confused.

1. What specifically will happen to the Firecuda after the SSD part dies?

2. Is the lifespan about the same as a HDD? Since its technically the same thing I can't see why my friends are telling me its going to die quickly.

3. I'm upgrading from a Hitachi 1TB Drive (5 1/2 years old) which is a mere 75mb read 79mb write. Was this a good choice?

4. What is with people moaning about it being seagate? Can someone please give me a straight answer to why people say they are so bad? I don't have a large budget so considering it has a 5 year warranty + a free game I couldn't complain.

5. What actually happens to the stuff that is moved over to the SSD? Is it copied data or is it literally moved to that area? If so doesn't it have quite a lot of read/writes?

Thanks.

 

[Paul NZ]

Some Seagate hdd's have had buggy firmware. That's probably the main issue people have had with them.

It can disappear from the BIOS. And it can also stop working altogether, if you dont update the firmware on it (if an update is available) to fix it

Earlier seagate hdd's that had this prob werent that easy to fix. Sometimes you could tell, because you could hear it clicking. They called it the "click of death"

And if you couldnt fix it, it would die completely

Some Seagate hdd's also suffered from a bsy firmware bug.

 

[TJ Hooker]

I imagine that entire drive would stop working after the SSD cache dies, but that's not going to happen. SSDs have a finite number of write cycles they can endure (unlike HDDs which I believe theoretically have no limit on amount of writes), but it will take a long time for you to hit that limit and in all likelihood the hard drive will fail mechanically or the drive will be obsolete before that happens.

Lifespan of an SSHD shouldn't really be any different than a normal HDD.

I'm not sure if the data in the cache is only stored there, or duplicated on the HDD as well. Don't know that it really matters though.

Most people will probably tell you you're better off getting a dedicated SSD (~250 GB or bigger) for OS and key applications, and normal HDD for everything else. That being said, I had an SSHD in the laptop I used to own a couple years back (Seagate drive, 750GB 7200RPM HDD with 8GB SSD cache) and I was quite happy with it and didn't even notice a huge difference when I upgraded the laptop with an SSD.

 

[Myrmidonas]

I have had Seagate's 500GB SSHD for some years now working on RAID 0. I remember I did a "research" before I bought them and I found out than in the unlikely, due to MTBF, case that the entire SSD portion of the drive stops working the controller is designed that way that rest of the HDD will continue to work as if there was never an SSD portion. That was the main reason I did try my luck with the SSHDs in the first place. Both drives are still operational today, without any reduce in their initial performance.Last time I measured them was some days ago, two benchmarks in RAID and without. I even start thinking on getting two Firecudas for the same reason.

The "old" drives are the Momentus XT ST95005620AS

 

[seagate_surfer]

The FireCuda works dynamically and intuitively, meaning that it will identify which files you're accessing most frequently, and put a copy of them, not the original, on the SSD cache. The thinking behind this is, say the SSD cache is holding a copy of file A, then notices you're accessing file B more, it can write file B over file A on the SSD cache without you losing file A because it's still on the spinning section. This helps make the drive performance efficient.

The FireCuda has a significantly longer limited warranty period to most desktop class drives, 5 years whereas most desktop drives usually have 2. Sometimes this gets overlooked, but usually to get a 5 year warranty, you have to go to more specialized classes of drives and sometimes even the more costly "Pro" versions of those.

If you would like, SeaTools is our free diagnostic software you can keep on hand to scan the drive for errors.

 

[Myrmidonas]

But SeaTools does not show if the SSD cache of the hybrid SSHD drive failed and to what extend, after the years and the avoidable NAND failures over time.Or am I missing something? I do not remember nay version of SeaTools showing that ever, or I was never looking to the right place.