Performance difference between SSD and SSHD?

ancient_mariner

ancient_mariner

Moderator
Messages
27,780
Name
Toni
Edit My Images
No
I'm presently running a 128Gb Samsung 830 SSD in my late 2008 unibody Macbook, but would really like more capacity for local image storage and do not want to lose the DVD drive. For those with real life experience of both pure SSD and the SSD/HDD hybrid drives, is there much of a performance hit using SSHD over SSD?

This Macbook is 5 years old, and has been kept adequately quick by upgrades last year to 4Gb (official limit, though 8Gb is now possible) and the SSD. However I don't want to go backward too much, and am trying to balance extending the life a bit longer vs investment in something more recent and quicker. A WD Black combi drive (128Gb SSD and 1TB HDD in a single case) is just too expensive

Thanks for looking.
 
An SSHD is a hybrid SSD and HD...i upgraded the GFs aging Acer with a Seagate Momentus XT 1TB model.

After a few boots your system files and commonly used apps are on the SSD and you get the general responsiveness of an SSD system drive. Files you use less frequent like images will stay on HDD.
 
I bought a Seagate Momentus as my data drive. Just for fun I swapped it for my Intel SSD as the boot drive. The whole machine was noticeably slower. It soon got swapped back to being for data only.

Not all the stuff that the system needs will be on the Solid part of a hybrid drive. All of your LR and PS dlls and similar stuff will still be dragged off the spinny bit.
 
Last edited:
Why not just increase the size of the SSD you have, a 250GB drive are now reletaviely inexpensive.
 
hollis_f said:
I bought a Seagate Momentus as my data drive. Just for fun I swapped it for my Intel SSD as the boot drive. The whole machine was noticeably slower. It soon got swapped back to being for data only.
Click to expand...
And your Intel SSD is which version/size?

SSDs are not all they are cracked up to be sub 100+GB due to the way they are designed and a HDD is often quicker.
 
Thanks guys.

Andy, worth noting that some of the early SSDs weren't always very quick in all circumstances, but I doubt any current production models could be approached by spinning rust now.
 
hollis_f said:
I bought a Seagate Momentus as my data drive. Just for fun I swapped it for my Intel SSD as the boot drive. The whole machine was noticeably slower. It soon got swapped back to being for data only.

Not all the stuff that the system needs will be on the Solid part of a hybrid drive. All of your LR and PS dlls and similar stuff will still be dragged off the spinny bit.
Click to expand...

It takes a while for the often used files to be cached....a good 4 or 5 reboot cycles before the important system files are on the SSD and you get SSD boot times. Likewise with LR and PS it will take some time before the drive 'learns' what files are most commonly accessed and caches them.

Hybrid drives are a total waste of time for data drives.….they are pretty much exclusively for the laptop upgrade use case where you want most of the system performance benefit of SSD while retaining a decent amount of storage.
 
arad85 said:
And your Intel SSD is which version/size?

SSDs are not all they are cracked up to be sub 100+GB due to the way they are designed and a HDD is often quicker.
Click to expand...

My 64gb SSD performs quicker than I've ever seem any conventional hd. My i3 laptop coming up to three years old still runs circles around your average new PC box in terms of things like boot speed, app opening, total lack of app hangs and general responsiveness.
 
mid_gen said:
.... they are pretty much exclusively for the laptop upgrade use case where you want most of the system performance benefit of SSD while retaining a decent amount of storage.
Click to expand...

Thanks Chris - that's exactly the application here and it's relatively tempting - certainly going to be better than pulling images from an external USB drive. I wonder if that + raising memory to 8GB would be enough to make it last another year-18 months?
 
ancient_mariner said:
Andy, worth noting that some of the early SSDs weren't always very quick in all circumstances, but I doubt any current production models could be approached by spinning rust now.
Click to expand...
Which is why I asked which disk it is... IAlso, if you don't select AHCI mode in the BIOS and leave it on IDE, it will be slower (IDE doesn't support NCQ).
 
Never mind.. I read the original post I quoted the other way around (that the hybrid was quicker than the SSD)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top