Seagate SSHD Hybrid Drive Unboxing & Technology Explanation
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
914 words · ~4 min read
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This video is brought to you by the Corsair Vengeance K70 and K95. These
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fully mechanical keyboards are designed for performance gaming. Visit
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Corsair.com/benancegaming to learn more. Welcome to my unbagging
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of something that I personally think is really important and really interesting,
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but you might disagree, but I mean, come on. At this point, you clicked on the
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video. You might as well watch it, right? This is the creatively named
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Seagate Desktop SSHD 2000 Gigabyte.
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Really like whoever names their products uh they get an award for being very
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practical. Um so what it is is it is their first desktop hybrid drive. So it
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contains in spite of its normal 3 and 12 in form factor and normal SATA 36 Gbit
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per second interface a regular mechanical 3 and 12 in drive. So, it's
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available in 1 TB or two terabyte. Although there a little birdie told me
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there might be a a higher capacity one later. Although saying that there might
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be a higher capacity hard drive later is about like saying the sun might rise.
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Like they really are about the same probability because if the sun stopped rising then all the hard drives would
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probably go away anyway. Um so it contains a mechanical hard drive as well
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as an SSD inside that completely doesn't
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need to be configured at all. So, the 8 gig SSD, and that's seems pretty small,
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but more on that in a moment, dynamically finds the data that you use
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most often and caches it in there for much, much faster reads. Now, there's a
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little bit of a writing strategy as well, but not nearly to the same extent
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as it uses the SSD for reads, which is really important, particularly for
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things like your operating system. So, if you're getting used to devices like
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smartphones and tablets and even ultrabooks to a lesser extent that run
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strictly off of flash, you're probably getting used to a level of
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responsiveness that just can't be achieved through pure mechanical. That's
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where the SSD comes in. So even though it's quite small, you're able to cache
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the things that are going to make your system feel really responsive, but
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you're able to have that large capacity backup for things like large games that
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you want to install or large programs like, I don't know, you know, Adobe
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Suite or or things like that. And it really does give sort of the best of
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both worlds. In addition to performance, you're also going to potentially
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make the device last longer. So there's a few different ways of looking at this.
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Number one is you're adding more points of failure when you have SSD as well as
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mechanical. Number two, though, is that you're making them inherently last
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longer because SSDs don't like being written to. Eventually, they will die.
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Um, but what happens is because you're not always writing things directly to
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the SSD, you're actually writing to the hard drive, the SSD only gets written to
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when it's something that you use very, very frequently. And SSDs don't get worn
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out by reading from them. Okay. Then there's the mechanical drive that gets
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worn out about equally from reading and writing. So, you have to write it to it
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regardless. But what if you could read all of your most frequently used data
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from the SSD, which doesn't really wear out? See where I'm going with this? So,
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you could potentially get a longevity benefit as well. Now, this
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implementation is not the beall and endall of a hybrid solution. So, if you
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have two separate drives, you can use Intel SRT to use an SSD to cache a hard
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drive completely separately. And there are actually drives being manufactured
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with a single interface that have two separately addressable drives inside
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them. This is one of the benefits of say a 36 GB per second, right? Because
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you've got tons of bandwidth there as long as you're not talking about
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extremely high performance like enthusiast grade SSDs. There are other
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implementations as well. I mean, Microsoft's working on ways to have the
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OS handle some of the SSD caching itself. And Intel, um, Seagate and
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Western Digital worked on an extension to the SATA 3 IO that is going to allow
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the drives themselves, which really do know more about what's going on inside
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them than the OS necessarily does, to start providing hints to the OS about
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what to cache and when and where. So, the future is extremely exciting. And I
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believe that as much as I use solid state only in my desktop machines, I do
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use mechanical for mass storage over the
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network. So as much as I believe in solid state and love it, I do believe
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that a hybrid is going to be the future, at least for the near to midterm. So
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guys, do check this out. It's the Seagate Desktop SSHD.
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The most interesting name ever. Um, and
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don't forget to subscribe to Lines Tech Tips for unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos. Leave a like if you
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like the video, leave a dislike if you dislike the video, and leave a comment
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if you think my nose is too big for my face.