I have a Samsung SSD 850 Pro 256GB SATA (love this thing) as a boot drive and a 1TB Toshiba HDD for storage and every thing else. I need a bigger secondary HDD. Is there an advantage to a hybrid drive like the Seagate FireCuda as a secondary drive? Any suggestions?
Thanks in advance.
It's better than a standard HDD. As it has a 8GB MLC NAND Flash drive attached to it to speed up accessing your most used programs....hence the hybird name. They only come in 3 storage sizes; 500 GB, 1Tb and 2Tb.
Newegg.com has a deal for the 2Tb size for $99.
Seagate FireCuda Gaming SSHD 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive ST2000DX002 - Newegg.com
Thanks. I wasn't sure if a hybrid drive would be of any advantage as a secondary drive. The good people at Seagate Technical Support chat couldn't give me a straight answer.
I'm not sure that the cache of a hybrid drive would give a large advantage for a data drive. The cache is used for frequently accessed things. That may be helpful for an OS drive. It's less obvious for a data drive, That may be why Seagate support couldn't give you a yes or no answer.
I upgraded my data drive to a 4TB Seagate Iron Wolf one a few months ago. Seagate IronWolf Pro ST4000NE001 4TB 7200 RPM 128MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive - Newegg.com It's a NAS drive, so it's more expensive than regular desktop drives. It runs more quietly. Crystal Disk Mark tests it at more than 200MB/s sequential read and write, which isn't bad.
I've had a hybrid installed before. I could not tell the difference between it and a standard HDD, especially if the drive is being used only for data file storage and not running programs from it. I would not spend any extra money for a hybrid drive.
Is cache size important on a secondary drive?
Hi there
@JayceeM
@bobkn
It MOST DEFIINTELY IS.
SLOW DISKS are the bane of any system -- for HDD's you need if possible 7200RPM with the largest possible cache size -- this makes a huge difference in I/O performance. Forget Hybrids -- just have the SSD for where it matters e.g OS and a decent HDD for your data.
The reason a large cache size matters is that Windows is reasonably sophisticated and has a built in sort of "A.I" algorithim which "learns" on how you use the computer and is able to predict reasonably well with reasonable accuracy what you are likely to do next and what data you require -- so it does a "prefetch" which reads this data and holds it in the disk cache area which is very much faster than getting data by waiting for the moving arm to select the sectors and retrieve the data.
This cache is filled when the CPU is relatively idle so when you need the data it's there.
Even 5400 RPM disks (ugh) with a large cache will perform far better than similarly sized and 'speccd' ones with a smaller cache.
Note also even if the HDD is a secondary HDD if it's slow the computer performance will degrade every time the HDD access is required -- even if you had a top of the range i10 processor is it now !!!
People often totally fail to understand that pretty well most performance problems on domestic computers are down to really cheap, horrible consumer grade HDD's. It's rarely RAM or CPU power these days or even the graphic system --always assuming that you aren't trying to run W10 x-64 on a 1GB RAM machine and trying VM's on that as well !!!!!.
Cheers
jimbo
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