SSD....AND....a hybrid?

[alexlord_y2k]

I am wondering the potential (or lack thereof) of using a hybrid SSD as well as a standard SSD?

Reason:- I bought a laptop which had a great price for its spec (£500 [$790] for an i7, hi/mid geforce, bluray, 8gb ram....and the cherry on cake....SSD). However probably the only downside is it ONLY has an SSD, with 100gb storage - that'll be gone in a week.

....another £50 [$75] spent and I can fill the empty 2.5" bay with another HDD, except I have had a curveball - I can purchase a decent size SSD Hybrid for nearly the same price as a very large HDD. Given all my cloud storage, and an external 2Tb drive - total storage is not a massive concern to me, so it puts these two firmly in competition with one another.

Question is then..... with the SSD left as a strictly OS drive, would there be any discernable benefit to having yet another SSD in the mix, in the form of a secondary hybrid? Would the existing SSD take away all that wonderful caching benefit you’ get in a hybrid?

Does caching even still work on your secondary HDD?? (sorry I’m a noob in these things!)

I guess I just cant gauge how much caching actually improves performance outside of the OS functions? (I’d love Chrome + games on secondary drive to have some speed gains)

 

[WyomingKnott]

Caching improves read access to collections of files that you open or access repeatedly, or need to open really fast. The first pretty much describes the OS and software, the second described game levels and scratch space for intense applications like Photoshop.

While a hybrid storage drive won't do any harm, I can't imagine you getting much benefit from it. It will do its very best to cache the files that you read most often.

 

[k1114]

The ssd as strictly the os, does not cache. And only the files on it benefit from the ssd's speed. The hybrid drive will only cache itself, the files on the hdd.

 

[popatim]

K1114 is right on the money. If you want the second drive to be fast get another ssd, if you want sometimes fast but lots more room get the hybrid. Just be aware how caching works. If you dont use a program frequently it wont get cached rendering your hybrid drive nothing more that a regular drive.

 

[alexlord_y2k]

Thanks guys, it's as I thought then (although I should have been clearer), 90% of your performance gains come from your SSD OS, and only very regular access to certain parts of the secondary drive would benefit from a hybrid.

Just one slight question on people's experience... 80% of time spent on laptop is on the net.. Do browsers access HD much or does decent RAM space render any HD performance gains irrelevant?