SSHD vs SSD Drives competition 2021

SSHD vs SSD Drives competition 2021.

We’ve come a long way since the very first 5MB hard drives were flown by cargo plane and moved by forklift trucks. These days, you have many great options for storing your data. In fact, you probably have too many options! This variety of options can lead to some confusion.

When buying a hard drive today, you have three types of drives: SSD, HDD, or SSHD. This acronym soup might encourage you to just give up and go back to the clay tablets. But we’ll help you figure out what works best for your needs.

What Are SSDs, HDDs, and SSHDs

The first obvious step in all of this is to explain what these three types of discs are and describe in more detail what these acronyms actually mean.

SSDs are solid-state drives. They have no moving parts at all and use solid-state flash memory.

Hard drives are hard drives. These are traditional mechanical drives that were standard until recently. It uses spinning discs coated with a magnetic substance to store data. Tiny read/write heads flutter across the surface of these disks, hovering in a hair-lobe of air.

SSHDs are Solid State Hybrid Drives. The “hybrid” part of the name refers to the fact that these drives contain both solid-state memory and rotating mechanical drives. Smart software inside the drive determines which files to download to the solid-state memory in the background. Therefore, when you want to access files that have been loaded into the solid-state cache. You will get performance similar to a pure SSD.

Performance

When it comes to this comparison, when it comes to performance, there is a clear hierarchy.

Solid State Drives

Solid state drives are the fastest drive type in every comparison. A good quality SATA 3 solid state drive will more or less meet the connection type limitations with read and write speeds of around 600MB / s.

But SSDs come in other formats, such as NVME. NVME SSDs with read and write speeds of around 3500 MB / s are now common, and a new generation of drives with speeds of over 5500 MB / s is coming soon.

Solid State Hybrid Drives

SSHDs are only available as SATA drives, so they can never exceed the 600MB / s connection speed limit. In addition, they can only achieve SSD speed for short periods of time. Basically as long as there is data in the SSD cache. Thus, the larger the SSD cache, the longer it can maintain high data transfer rates.

It also depends on whether the SSHD has previously loaded the desired files into the cache. If it doesn’t, you will revert to standard hard drive speed.

Hard drives

Traditional hard drives are the slowest of all. While high-performance 7200 rpm drives can reach speeds of around 230 MB / s and experimental drives showed speeds of almost 500 MB / s, the typical 5400 rpm drive you find in laptops or desktops is even close. does not fit. Speeds between 30 and 110 MB / s are much more typical.

Physical Size

SSDs come in standard sizes 3.5 and 2.5 inches using a SATA connector. In this case, they occupy the same volume as the mechanical drives of these dimensions. However, this is for compatibility with hard drive bays, so there is no need for them to be that large.

NVME drives are about the same size as desktop PC RAM and fit snugly against the motherboard. This means they don’t take up any drive bays at all.

SSHD and HDD are only available in 3.5 and 2.5 inch form factors. In addition, they are significantly heavier than SSDs, so they add more of the system, at least in relative terms.

Cost and Capacity

The cost of solid state drives has dropped dramatically over the past few years, but a quality drive will continue to offer the highest price per gigabyte of any drive type. SSDs are also relatively limited in their maximum capacity.

The largest drives are currently 2TB in size, but with that amount of space, they are attractively priced. Therefore, systems are usually equipped with disks from 250 to 500 GB. That’s a little bit in the world of 100GB video games and 4K video!

SSHDs and HDDs are similarly priced, with SSHDs being slightly more expensive thanks to the inclusion of a small amount of SSD storage and more complex electronics and firmware. Both of these drive types have a low cost per gigabyte and are offered with massive capacities exceeding 10TB at the top tier.

Reliability

When it comes to the reliability of these various types of actuators, the water is a little cloudy. We have a wealth of data on the reliability of mechanical drives. They typically have an MTBF (mean time between failure) of 100,000 hours. Failure is usually caused by wear on mechanical components. Therefore, even if you use your hard drive a little, but it stays on, it will eventually fail.

In theory, SSDs should last forever, but the more affordable type of SSD memory you get in consumer drives will wear out a bit every time you write data to it. This is a tricky topic, so we suggest you read everything you need to know about SSD wear and tear to better understand the problem.

This is not a problem in today’s high-capacity SSDs. Torture tests for SSDs have shown that their lifespan is well beyond the rated lifespan of a data record. However, this is a concern on an SSHD with a small SSD cache that is constantly being written as temporary storage space.

Recommended Use Cases

Now that we’ve covered the strengths and weaknesses of these different drives, it’s time to talk about which drives are best for which use cases.

Solid state drives are best used as system drives that host the operating system and applications that benefit from the speed of an SSD. This includes video editors, productivity apps, and of course video games. Since SSDs are expensive, they are wasted on multimedia files or data archiving.

SSHD is a really smart choice for laptops that only have one drive bay. Whether your budget is tight or you need a lot of internal space, SSHD delivers a daily boost in productivity while also offering a lot of cheap storage.

Hard drives are ideal for storing large media files, backing up video games and other applications, and any other type of data that doesn’t require SSD speed. These drives are cheap, and if you’re using external hard drives that don’t work all the time, they are also a good backup solution.

In systems that may have multiple drives, the optimal solution today is to use a primary SSD with a large hard drive as the secondary drive. However, with the prices of SSDs falling and the size of the future being increased, the future does seem to be purely solid-state. We’re not quite there yet, but the day when SSD storage is cheaper than HDD storage may not be as far away as you think.

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