SSD and SSHDs

[Nanako]

I'm in the market to replace a drive which is dying, 1 TB size
I use this drive primarily for gaming, and i'm interested in speeding up load times of games by getting something faster than a standard platter drive. I've never owned anything but normal drives before, solid state drives are objects of mythology and wonder to me, but i'd like to try it out.

I'm looking into SSDs a little, and the prices vary wildly, ive seen some prices as low as £60 but it turned out to be fake. Google shopping has a lot of fraudulent results which confuse things. What's the minimum/average one could expect to pay for a 1 TB SSD?

Failing that, I'm looking into hybrid drives. Which are advertised as having the speed of SSDs but at a much cheaper price. I understand the basic principle: Commonly used data is moved to an internal SSD area to make it load faster. But i've never experienced this in practise, and i don't know if/how well the advertising claims hold up.

With the case of gaming uses especially, will that work? For example if you're gradually progressing through a game and moving to new levels, each wouldn't be loaded more than once typically, and hence maybe not be "commonly used" enough to be moved to the faster area.
Do these drives typically have some way to specify files (ie, all the assets for a particular game) that i want to be stored in the faster part? Or is it entirely automated.

Are there any particular brands or models of hybrid drives that come recommended? The seagate Firecuda range is appealingly cheap. Exceptionally cheap, £37 for a 1 TB drive? I've been paying more than that for entirely ordinary disks. This seems too good to be true. Do they have some hidden flaw like a short lifespan?

As the old saying goes, if you buy cheap, you pay twice. I'm a little wary of going for the absolute cheapest options when something more midrange would be better value in the long run. But price is a concern.. My budget is about £80, and less is better

Any advice and recommendations will be appreciated

 

[AgentTryHard]

Hybrid drives aren't the most practical for gamers, but more for people looking for balanced productivity, opening the same software all the time. I'm sure it would have its benefits when it comes to gaming, but having an SSD is definitely your best bet.

I would recommend staying to reputable brands like Samsung or Kingston to avoid any issues. If price is a big issue, I commonly see a reasonably sized SSD (256gb of maybe 500gb) that holds the operating system and your most used programs and games, and then hold onto the hard drive for less commonly used software and file storage.

Hope this helps!

 

[Dugimodo]

The best use of a hybrid drive is in a single drive system where you can only have one drive and can't afford an SSD large enough to hold everything.
For any other case a separate SSD for the OS and a HDD for data and games etc is a much nicer option.

Some things they will help as a game drive, if you launch the same game every day it will open faster, but progressing to new areas while in the game will see no benefit. Overall there is not much to be gained but they are not all that expensive either.

They do actually boot up at close to SSD speeds when used as the main drive though.

 

[gingerrankin]

A 1 TB firecuda hybrid costs about 50- 55 pounds. A good 1 TB SSD costs 200 - 250 pounds. Choose good brands like Samsung or Crucial.

 

[seagate_surfer]

Hello Nanako, if you are interested in faster loading times for your games and cut scenes then the FireCuda will help out in that area. FireCuda drives combine the latest NAND flash technology with a traditional hard drive for a compact blend of capacity and speeds up to 5× faster than typical hard drives, all backed by a 5-year warranty. Also you can Store up to 40 games per TB (at 25GB per game) with the 2TB FireCuda hard drives and we provide a link to retailers on the product page.

Regardless of what drive you choose, we thank you for considering Seagate. Game on!!!!