looking for internal HDD/SSHD advice

[panisch]

Hey guys, looks like my wd green 600gb is about to die. however it's time for a new hdd for me.

I do also have a ssd (samsung 840 120gb) for my OS and some games. Im not looking for another pure ssd (for budget reasons).

I figured a SSHD would be a good choice for my budget, since performance is of course always appreciated.

The Seagate Desktop SSHD ST1000DX001 caught my eye, but what does "8GB Hybrid SSD" exactly mean? I mean it's a hybrid, yes, but what's up with the 8gb?
Would the performance gain of a SSHD be noticeable, compared to a HDD, when installing games on it? (i dont have any experience with SSHDs)

..or do you have any other suggestions?
- 1 TB is enough for me, i dont need more
- no less than 7200 rpm
- i got 50-100€ to spend
- im looking for a low price with good performance, not a -huge- storage

thanks in advance

 

[JaredDM]

First off, I'd strongly caution against anything sold by Seagate as the quality of their drives has dropped significantly in the last few years. A hybrid drive SSHD is essentially just a hard drive with a small SSD cache. That particular one is an 8Gb SSD and a 1Tb hard drive that it's built onto. You'll see little to no difference with playing games from a HDD to an SSHD in all honesty. You'll see faster OS load times and maybe some improvement in loading apps you use all the time. But a game's data is far too large to end up in the SSD cache in any event, so it'll still be reading it all from the HDD part.

SSHD's essentially just keep track internally of what sectors are most commonly accessed (such as those needed to boot Windows) then it makes a second copy of those sectors in the SSD cache so it never actually has to access the HDD to read those sectors. It sort of learns your behavior. Going from a true SSD to a SSHD will likely seem slow and sluggish to you.

Also when it comes to games you gain nothing by using an SSD over a HDD, other than perhaps a few seconds of initial load time. Games are generally all designed to minimize HDD access during game play and they usually group small files into larger files so they are read sequentially to minimize the need for random HDD access. Random access speed is actually most of the advantage of SSD and for sequential reads/writes HDD's aren't that much slower (barring a few really new super speed SSDs). If dual drives is an option (not sure if this is a laptop) I'd recommend you keep your SSD as just the OS drive, and you can safely move the games over to a regular old HDD.

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey there, panisch.

I'm really sorry to hear about the problems you're having with your HDD.

Basically the noticeable part regarding the performance of your drive while gaming, is the loading time. The faster your drive is, the shorter the in-game loading screens and starting the game will be.

The SSHD (a.k.a. hybrid drive) is basically an HDD with a small SSD. It's only 8GB as this small flash memory part is just for caching, which means that the most commonly used files are stored there for faster access. Hybrid drive are generally 5400RPM HDD part along with a small SSD part and are faster than standard 7200RPM HDDs.

If you decide to go with a WD drive again, you could check out the WD Blue (7200RPM model) drive or the WD Blue SSHD (note that it is a 2.5" drive which means that you'd probably need mounting brackets for a 3.5" drive slot). You can take a closer look at their features here:
WD Blue Drive
WD Blue SSHD

edit: seems like you've already received an answer while I was typing

Hope that helps. Please let me know if you have any questions.
Boogieman_WD

 

[panisch]

Thanks guys, that cleared it up for me.

@JaredDM
It's a Desktop and ill be keeping my Samsung 840 SSD. It's the 2nd drive (storage) that im trying to replace.

I understand now that the hybrids have a small SSD only and therefore dont make alot of sense for game storage. A SSHD would probably be a good budget variant if i didnt have a SSD at all already?

I am going to stick with the good old basic 1TB WD HDD. Green seems slower and i dont see how the +price/performance would justify a black for me, so blue it is.

Thanks again both of you.

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Sure thing!

Otherwise there are quite a few differences between the WD Blue drive and the WD Black drive, like the 3-year longer warranty period of the WD Black black drive and its dual processor. But having in mind you'd be using this just for gaming, you won't find any quite noticeable difference between the two models while playing.
Basically if you don't need a drive for something more demanding like video editing for example, a 1TB WD Blue HDD (a 7200RPM model) will be OK. After all, the important thing is that you make your choice accordingly, having in mind your personal preference and your budget.

Cheers mate!