Interested in an SSHD Hybrid Drive

[Jeff Kaos]

I'm looking to expand the storage in my gaming system to 2TB or more for as little money as possible. I'm trying to stay in the $100 range, preferably less, and I've been considering several different drives:
Seagate 3TB drive Or a WD Black 2TB Performance Desktop Hard Drive

The WD drive is a little more expensive and has less capacity but it's a Western Digital quality drive. During my research I also came across a Seagate 2 TB SSHD "Hybrid" drive for around the same price as the WD drive. According to one of the bullet points on the Amazon page it has: "High-capacity hard drive and 8GB of solid state MLC flash to add SSD-like performance to any desktop". Right now I'm leaning towards the 3 TB Seagate because of the price vs. capacity but I'm also wondering if this hybrid drive is anything or is it just a gimmick best avoided. If anyone has any knowledge they could share about this I'd be grateful. Right now my plan is to put my OS and games on the 2TB drive and keep my systems current 1TB drive installed to use as backup and media storage. I also like the idea of getting the hybrid drive and using the flash for the OS.

 

[rulejunior]

The Seagate I personally believe is a bit of a gimmick because of the amount of space the MLC Flash has. 8gb really isn't a whole lot of space in today's day and age and if I am not mistaken, it only caches stuff used a whole lot that will fit that 8 gb, so I don't think it will cache windows. I could be wrong however.

On another note, not to shoot you down, but stick with the Western Digital drive just in the retrospect it will probably last longer and is better built, but then again I am a bit biased when it comes to storage companies because of my experience with both Seagate and WD

 

[dudeman509]

The SSHD works well in practice in systems that don't pass a ton of data through the drive to confuse the cache. I have a laptop SSHD drive that is mainly used for web surfing, word processing, and loading Windows. It serves that role well, and load times are very quick.

It did not perform much faster than a standard 7200 RPM drive when used heavily as a system drive with pictures, music, games, etc. on it. I honestly could tell no benefit from the SSHD in such a situation.

The best setup is a small SSD (some are only $40-50) for your OS/frequently used programs, and a HDD for games/storage.

The WD Black are good drives, or you could also look into Toshiba's 2 and 3 TB drives (rebranded Hitachis - good drives, and they're under the $80 price point for the 3).