Storage drive - any benefit to SSHD (hybrid)?

[Llamaman]

In a nutshell;
I'm adding a storage drive to my laptop to complement my SSD OS drive. Is there any benefit to a SSHD, or will a standard mechanical drive deliver the same performance?


Background and rambling;
I presently have a laptop with a smallish SSD for OS and programs. My photos are currently stored on both a portable 1Tb drive, which is backed up to a 2-drive raided NAS.
This has been fine up til now, as I do very little editing or sorting of my photos other than putting them into folders by event.
However, I now want to start doing more with my collection - firstly sorting my collection in Lightroom and trying my hand at editing (and so probably shooting RAW in future and the larger files that'll bring). I currently have c. 180Gb of photos.

Experience of transferring large numbers of photos to the portable drive and over the network to the NAS has suggested that this may not be the fastest way of doing things - I'm thinking I should have the main storage drive in the laptop and back this up overnight to the NAS (and maybe use the portable drive as an off-site backup)
I'm fortunate to have space for a second drive in the laptop, so the SSD can stay as an OS drive, and I can add a second 2.5" drive for photo storage. Question is, what drive to get? I see you can get hybrid drives which include elements of an SSD for commonly-used files. I can see the benefit for a boot drive, but would I get any benefit for storage access? I can't justify the expense of a 1TB SSD!
I was looking at a Seagate Momentus XT 1TB as a hybrid drive. If there's no point I may as well get a standard 7,200RPM drive and save myself c. £25.

 

[Deleted sulking member 63079]

You might see better performance with a hybrid drive, but probably not based on your usage. The drives "learn" which files are accessed most often and leave them in the SSD portion of it as a cache to increase performance. This learning takes a little time though, so you see perfomance increase with usage if you're regularly using the same files. But if it was image files, then probably not as I don't imagine you revisit the files often enough.

And Seagate drives came out top on the "whose drives fail the most" study, so I would steer clear of them anyway

 

[Llamaman]

Ah, so a Western Digital blue it is then. I've got a couple of reds in my NAS and they seem to be doing OK.

 

[Snapsh0t]

The WD Blues are only 5400RPM so treat yourself to a WD Black or even an HGST Travelstar which seems to get excellent reviews. I have four of the HGST equivalents to WD Reds in my NAS and they're very good indeed.

 

[Deleted sulking member 63079]

I've just shoved WD Reds in my rig, not using them in Raid configuration, but they're still very reliable drives.

 

[Llamaman]

The WD Blues are only 5400RPM so treat yourself to a WD Black or even an HGST Travelstar which seems to get excellent reviews. I have four of the HGST equivalents to WD Reds in my NAS and they're very good indeed.

Thanks, I'll check out the prices, but I've heard there is now very little performance difference between the black and blue editions, plus the blues come in larger drive sizes.
Is Travelstar Toshiba? The brand name rings a bell from a long time ago when I was more into computer stuff.

 

[Snapsh0t]

No, HGST is Hitachi Global Storage Technologies which used to be IBM's HDD division and is now owned by WD. The 1TB Travelstar is cheaper than the WD Blue so well worth a look.

 

[steveb]

I've found the HGST HTS721010A9E630 1TB 7200 rpm drive very good as a storage HD in my older MacBook Pro. Currently I use a 256GB Crucial SSD as the boot drive, but with SSD's falling in price that will soon be upgraded to 512GB. I echo what was said earlier about the Seagate SSHD, and bear in mind the SSHD is based around a 5400 rpm drive. They used to use a 7200 rpm drive until Seagate discontinued them.

 

[Llamaman]

Thanks for all the help guys. In the end I went for the WD Black 750Gb - the company I was ordering the drive bay from had the 750Gb black and 1Gb blue in stock, and the black was a couple of quid cheaper.

What also helped swing it was I read some tests where although blue and black had similar performance for large files, the black was way ahead for smaller files, which is exactly what I'll be using it for. Smaller capacity drive, but by the time I've got close to 750Gb of photos, it'll probably be time for a whole new laptop with bigger SSDs anyway.