SSHD or HDD

[Lima0-1]

I'm thinking of getting 2.5 inch hard drive to use as an external hard drive to store my thousands upon thousands of images and maybe some video clips as well. I will be putting the hard drive in a Orico Transparent USB 3.0 2.5 inch enclosure. I was thinking of getting an SSHD but had doubts so I considered normal 7200RPM HDDs as well. SSD is obviously out of the question as it costs a freaking kidney for a 2TB one.

The SSHD in question is a Seagate Firecuda 7200RPM 2.5 inch 2TB and the normal HDD in question is just pretty much any 2.5 inch 2TB 7200 rpm HDD. Will the type of drive make any difference in transferring speed, reading etc..? I don't want to get a already made external drive as I see the transfer speed is slower(max I saw was 250MBPS) than using the enclosure which in this case Orico claims is able to handle 5 GBPS.

Should I get a SSHD or just a normal HDD for my above mentioned purpose?

Side note, any suggestion on the other brands that perform better or is cheaper etc... is greatly welcomed.
Side note 2, might use this hard drive in a laptop in the future should the need to arise.

 

[USAFRet]

For that type of use, a regular HDD is indicated.
The SSD portion of the SSHD will not really do anything.

Write speed to a SSHD is exactly the same as to a HDD. Read speed benefits only from those files which live in the cache portion. As you will not be accessing the same files (blocks, actually) all the time....it will just be reading from the spinning platter anyway.

 

[Lima0-1]

For that type of use, a regular HDD is indicated.
The SSD portion of the SSHD will not really do anything.

Write speed to a SSHD is exactly the same as to a HDD. Read speed benefits only from those files which live in the cache portion. As you will not be accessing the same files (blocks, actually) all the time....it will just be reading from the spinning platter anyway.

Thanks for the answer, much appreciated. Does RPM make any difference?

 

[USAFRet]

For that type of use, a regular HDD is indicated.
The SSD portion of the SSHD will not really do anything.

Write speed to a SSHD is exactly the same as to a HDD. Read speed benefits only from those files which live in the cache portion. As you will not be accessing the same files (blocks, actually) all the time....it will just be reading from the spinning platter anyway.

Thanks for the answer, much appreciated. Does RPM make any difference?

5400-5900-7200....obviously, the 7200 will be faster, all else being equal.
2 otherwise identical machines, 1 with a 5400RPM drive and 1 with a 7200RPM drive...you'd probably to tell in a blind test.

 

[madmatt30]

The orico specs are plainly a lie mate , you wouldn't see that transfer crate with a fast ssd via usb3 even

Its also not worth paying the huge premium for a 2.5inch 7200 rpm drive to use via usb3.

You are absolutely 100% better off buying an external portable drive off the shelf.
120-160mb transfer speeds is plenty fast enough for media storage IMO, you could fill a 2tb drive in under 2 hours completely.

 

[rkzhao]

To somewhat expand on what madmatt is saying, interface speeds can be misleading because the underlying HDD will be the limiting factor.
6Gbps is SATA 3 interface limit. 5Gbps I believe is USB3 speed. ~150MB/s is probably the best sustained performance you can expect from a HDD and that's ~1.2Gbps. Only SSDs are able to fully saturate the interface speeds.

Now, I would still go with an enclosure over a dedicated external drive mostly because it's more flexible to replace and upgrade.

Anyways, for the performance side of things, higher RPM generally means higher speeds but more power draw.
The main speed benefits of SSHDs are in random operations. External storage use is generally more sequential, at least on writes.

In terms of brands, Seagate and WD are fairly equivalent, but People tend to prefer WD because they're a bit better at marketing to consumers.
HGST tends to be the most reliable but also the most expensive.

Personally, I'd just go with a regular Barracuda or WD Blue. External storage uses are fairly light on an HDD.