Although today’s solid-state drives have reached a level of popularity that is almost one per person, ten years ago, solid-state drives not only had enough capacity to install an operating system, but the high price of NAND FLASH also made solid-state drives only “supplements” for high-end players to try early adopters. In order to provide users with a better user experience at the lowest cost, traditional storage manufacturers have put in a lot of effort, and have launched many eye-catching but rather “chicken ribs” products, such as the short-lived hybrid hard disk SSHD.
SSHD can be simply understood as a mixture of NAND FLASH particles + mechanical hard disk, which looks a bit similar to a large-capacity cache mechanical hard disk, but the execution mechanism is completely different.
The hard disk chip adopts DDR DRAM chip, the capacity is from a few MB to several hundred MB, which mainly provides data buffering for the mechanical hard disk; while the NAND FLASH particle capacity in the hybrid hard disk is usually several GB to dozens of GB, mainly It takes advantage of its high-speed access to improve the average access time of mechanical hard disks, and the main storage is still the high-capacity mechanical hard disk part, which is somewhat similar to the “Ready Boost” mechanism in Windows Vista and Windows 7.
What are the advantages of a hybrid hard drive?
In principle, the hybrid hard disk will record the most frequently read and written data at a certain time, and save it in the NAND FLASH with the fastest response speed, so as to achieve the performance comparable to the solid state hard disk. Although it sounds simple and straightforward, hybrid hard drives have their own set of working mechanisms and are not affected by the operating system.
So, how is the actual performance? It allows Word to have the speed of opening a notepad; the system can also write the data in the memory to NAND FLASH when it is sleeping, and it can instantly enter the previous working state after waking up, while the mechanical hard disk may still be at this time. Read the page file.
Someone once installed a 2.5-inch WD hybrid hard drive into a Microsoft Xbox ONE X game console. The hard drive belongs to the high-end “Black Label” series, using a combination of 8GB NAND FLASH+1TB 7200 RPM mechanical hard drives. In the DLC “Pharaoh’s Curse” of the game “Assassin’s Creed: Origins”, after the protagonist Bayek jumped from the statue of Ramses the Great and fell to his death many times, the loading time of the game only took a few seconds to complete, really Comparable to a solid state hard drive.
Not only achieves both performance and capacity, but the hybrid hard disk writes frequently used data into NAND FLASH and also stops the mechanical hard disk part to “standby” until new data is read and written. It will start, which reduces the read and write frequency of the magnetic head of the mechanical hard disk and the rotation time of the disk, improves the performance, and also greatly improves the service life and reduces the power consumption.
Although in terms of price, hybrid hard disks are more expensive than ordinary mechanical hard disks, but you must know that the terabyte-level solid-state hard disks ten years ago were sky-high and were only used in data centers and other fields, so they can be regarded as an important part of the popularization of solid-state hard disks. milestone.
Since it is so good, how can a hybrid hard disk become a chicken rib?
It is true that hybrid hard disks have many advantages, but it can be said that “the principle of success is also the principle of failure”. Once a large amount of data is continuously written and the capacity of the small-capacity NAND FLASH is exhausted, the weak read and write performance of the mechanical hard disk will be “the original.” Bilu”, especially some large-capacity hybrid hard disks are equipped with 5400-rpm SMR “shingled” mechanical hard disks… Therefore, hybrid hard disks are not only not popular in the consumer field, but also in enterprise-level applications. Disk replacement.
The last straw that broke the “camel” of hybrid hard disks was the solid-state hard disks with continuously falling prices and increasing capacities.
In particular, the 128GB SATA solid state has become the standard for modern installations, while mechanical hard disks have been put into the “cold palace” of NAS, monitoring and mobile hard disks. Therefore, hybrid hard disks are no longer necessary to exist, and become a no-compromise. Buttoned tasteless product.