There is only one reason people make hybrid products: To get the best out of two (or more) alternatives. Hybrid cars use fossil fuels and clean energy; hybrid plants produce hardier and tastier foods; and hybrid drives combine the best of hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs).
Hard Disk Drives
Hard disk drives are what we’re all used to. They’re the drives that come in our desktops and laptops, as well as the external drives that we use to store all of our perfectly legal video and audio files. They contain aeons of space (going up to 8TB (thanks Thunderbolt), although 2 – 4TB drives are far more common).
The problem with HDDs is that they’re a little finicky. You can’t knock them about too much or you’ll damage the sensitive, rapidly moving parts. They’re not exactly as delicate as dandelions, but you don’t want to kick them down the stairs too often, either.
The good thing about HDDs is that they are cheap, cheaper than SSDs.
Solid-State Drives
SSDs get around many of the problems that plague HDDs, but they aren’t perfect. For example, they don’t have any moving parts, so nothing can be dislodged or come loose or break off. They’re also super, super fast thanks to NAND flash memory (Marco Chiappetta – PCWorld).
But, they are very expensive, especially when compared to HDDs, which means they haven’t yet caught on with the general populace (as in those who don’t operate in an IT bubble). They also don’t have as much storage space as HDDs, largely because adding storage drives up the price.
Chiappetta says that another disadvantage of SSDs is that they don’t give any warning before they go belly-up. At least HDDs are considerate enough to announce that the end is nigh.
Enter the Hybrid
Hybrid hard drives take the storage capacity of HDDs and the speed of SSDs and combine them in one compact package. It contains a hard drive platter and an SSD portion. Frequently used data is cached on the SSD portion, while infrequently used data (and other digital media) is stored on the HDD (Jon L. Jacobi – PCWorld).
There are two other great things about hybrid drives:
1) They have a long-term effect that improves your computer’s efficiency.
2) They are cheaper than SSDs.
Mind you, they’re more expensive than HDDs, but only by a little bit.
Pundits are predicting that hard disk drives are on the way out; partly because all people, and not just IT geeks, constantly search for ways to make things faster, and partly because SSDs are, slowly, becoming more affordable.
This begs the question: Do hybrid drives have a future or will they also be shoved out by SSDs?
It’s too early to tell, but don’t let that stop you from enjoying the best of both worlds while the HDD vs. SSD battle unfolds.
