Ssd vs sshd vs hdd for a dump drive.

[lads9019]

Hey guys,

Was thinking about getting a 1tb ssd for my dump drive (games, programs etc), to speed up opening if applications plus eliminate the noise of a a hdd. Would buying an sshd see any performanxe gain or should i go straight for the ssd? Are there any hdd suited for performance? I looled at the velociraptor but id rather put another couple of hundred into getting a samsung evo.

 

[bliq]

wow, you must have a lot of games installed at once to need 1tb for apps. No HDD is going to match even a mediocre SSD in terms of access speed. That's essentially affects the time it takes to start opening an app. If it's a large app, it'd take a pretty fast RAID array to match the transfer speed of a good SSD. Even then, if the app is fragmented on disk, SSD's access speed advantage would basically destroy a HDD, or even most arrays of HDD until you start spending serious money.

 

[rhysiam]

SSHDs are a pretty decent middle ground between a HDD & SSD, and make sense if you have a large library of games and programs but don't have the budget for a large SSD. They use a variety of techniques to try and keep the regularly accessed and performance sensitive data on the flash storage. Let's say you open Photoshop or a particular game a lot, the drive will quickly learn that you want that data and it will load close to as fast as it would off a native SSD.

The problem with an SSHD is that if you decide to open a different program or game that you haven't used for ages, it's likely that all the relevant data will have been shifted off onto the mechanical storage and it won't load any faster than it would off a standard HDD. The second time it'll load fast, but not the first.

That's the trade off you make going with a much cheaper SSHD over a large SSD.

bliq makes a good point. Are you sure you need 1TB for games+programs? That's a lot? Steam makes it pretty easy to move games around. With a little effort you could probably make do with a smaller SSD and a HDD and manually put your current favourite games on the SSD, keeping your archive on the HDD. If that sounds like too much hassle, then the automated SSHD is probably your best option.

 

[USAFRet]

What drive(s) do you have now?

What is on them?