What is a Hybrid Hard Drive?

Do you know what a hybrid hard drive is? It’s simply an electromechanical spinning hard disk which contains several amount of the NAND flash memory. This NAND flash normally acts as a non-volatile cache that enables quicker access to data.

Nowadays, flash based hard drives have become more popular but they do not have the same price per GB that current hybrid hard drives achieve. The cost of a 32 GB non-volatile flash disk is also the same as that of a massive 750 GB hard drive. Therefore, why don’t you take advantage of the combination of these technologies in the meantime?

Hybrid hard drives combine the two technologies in order to offer an increased performance and also an increased improvement in the consumption of power. The flash memory is normally stored on board on the hard drive and picks up where else the normal hybrid hard drive leaves off. The speed can drastically be improved since mechanical latency is much slower than flash memory latency. Power consumption can also be improved since the often used application data can simply be stored and also pulled from flash memory.

Which are the best hybrid hard drives?

3.5″ Desktop Hard Drives

The Seagate Desktop Solid State Hybrid Drive is the current top choice for the consumer performance hybrid hard drives. It out paces all the other competitor hard drives and also maintains the price parity which makes it an easier selection if you want a high speed as well as a high capacity hard drive.

2.5″ Notebook Hard Drives

Seagate is absolutely the first to enter this hybrid hard drive space with the Momentus XT. This drive comes in various capacities that are up to 1TB. This drive beats out all the other non-SSD notebook drives in real world tests. The multiple GBs of flash storage are what allow this drive to be faster than the standard HDD. The 1TB Model usually runs about one hundred dollars or so which is an excellent value for the top of the line performance.

Another option to think about is the Toshiba Hybrid Hard Drive. This drive is pretty new, but has pretty solid specs. This hard drive has 500GB of space and also offers 8GB of NAND flash memory which really helps this hard drive to outperform the standard HDD. Currently, this drive is reasonably priced at under $100.

Solid State Drives (SSD)

If you are looking outside the box and want to go with an SSD drive that has great performance, the OCZ Vector, the Seagate 600 series as well as the Neutron GTX usually show great performance across the board. SandForce controllers definitely remain a favorite but if you want the best of the SandForce lot, always look for the Intel SSD 530. Another drive which can compete at the top is the Samsung’s SSD 840 Pro. This drive offers a complete in-house solution that is filled with Samsung components all throughout.

The mSATA class of the SSDs is also gaining a reputation due to the growth in the ultra-thin portables as well as embedded solutions. Even though there has been an explosion of products in this space, only a few are special. The Intel SSD 525 is currently the class leader in reliability, performance and also compatibility. Plextor M5M still provides a good performance which is also a viable selection candidate. For the specialty, OWC Aura Pro SSD is usually a high performance (1.8″SSD) which comes in capacities up to 480GB. It features a SandForce version of the SF-1200 processor. In the case that you have break-neck speed in mind and a huge budget, why don’t you look at the OCZ RevoDrive 3×2 that interfaces through a PCl-Express slot. By using this slot, you can get speeds that surpass 1000MB/s.