The outcast hybrid hard disk of the era has become a short-lived chicken rib

Although today’s solid-state drives have reached a level of popularity that is close to one per person, ten years ago, solid-state drives not only had enough capacity to install an operating system, but also the high price of NAND FLASH made solid-state drives only “supplements” for high-end players to try early adopters.

But did you know that in order to bring users a better user experience at the lowest cost, traditional storage manufacturers have put in a lot of effort, and have launched many bright but tasteless products, such as the short-lived hybrid hard disk SSHD.

Solid-state drives can be simply understood as a mixture of NAND FLASH particles + mechanical hard drives. It looks a bit like a large-capacity cache mechanical hard drive, but the operating 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.

The NAND FLASH particle capacity in a hybrid hard disk is usually several GB to dozens of GB.It is mainly to improve the average access time of mechanical hard disks by taking advantage of its high-speed access.The main body of 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 hybrid hard drives?

From a principle point of view, a hybrid hard disk will record the most frequently read and written data at a certain time, and save it in the fastest responsive NAND FLASH, so as to achieve performance comparable to that of a 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 what is the performance of solid state drives? It is no exaggeration to say that Word can also have the opening speed of Notepad. The system can also write the data in the memory into the NAND FLASH when it is sleeping, and immediately enter the previous working state after waking up, while the mechanical hard disk may still be reading the page file when it is powered on.

The author once installed a 2.5-inch Western Digital hybrid hard drive into the Microsoft XBOX ONE X game console.The hard disk belongs to the high-end “black disk” series, using a combination of 8GB NAND FLASH + 1TB 7200 rpm mechanical hard disk.

In the DLC “Pharaoh’s Curse” of the game “Assassin’s Creed: Origins”, after the protagonist Bayek jumped to his death from the statue of Ramses the Great several times, the loading time of the game only took a few seconds to complete, really Comparable to a solid state drive.

Not only achieves the performance and capacity of “fish and bear’s paw”,After the hybrid hard disk writes frequently used data to the NAND FLASH, it will also stop the mechanical hard disk part and “standby”.

It will start when new data is read and written, which reduces the read and write frequency of the magnetic head of the mechanical hard disk and the rotation time of the platter, improves the performance, and also greatly improves the service life and reduces the power consumption.

Although hybrid hard disks are a bit more expensive than ordinary mechanical hard disks in terms of price, it is important to know that TB-level solid-state hard disks were astronomically expensive ten years ago and were only used in data centers and other fields, so they are an important “milestone” in the popularization of solid-state hard disks

How can a hybrid hard drive 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 revealed. “.

Especially some high-capacity hybrid hard drives are equipped with 5400 RPM SMR “shingled” mechanical hard drives…you know. Therefore, the hybrid hard disk is not only not popular in the consumer field, but also cannot replace the traditional mechanical hard disk in the enterprise application field.

The last straw that overwhelmed the “camel” of hybrid hard disks was the solid-state hard disks with falling prices and increasing capacities. Not only the mainstream M.2 NVMe PCIe3.0 1TB products have reached the price of 500 yuan, but the 128GB SATA Solid-state drives have fallen below the 100-yuan mark, becoming the standard for modern installations.

Mechanical hard disks have been put into the “cold palace” of NAS, monitoring and mobile hard disks, so the situation of hybrid hard disks is even more embarrassing, and it has become a tasteless product. Go to the almighty treasure.

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