Summary
-
SSHDs combined an HDD with a small NAND cache for faster speeds, but the idea didn’t work.
-
SSD prices fell rapidly, causing SSHDs to disappear from the market.
-
I’m nostalgic for SSHDs, but a proper comeback is unlikely.
A little over a decade ago, SSDs began to drop in price, making them a viable storage option for consumer PCs and offering significantly faster performance than traditional HDDs.
However, its cost remained several times higher than that of standard hard drives, leading manufacturers to develop a new hybrid solution: the SSHD. Unfortunately, he never kept his promise.
Overpromised and undelivered SSHDs
A classic technological tale
SSDs (Solid State Drives) are a type of drive that uses fast flash storage to store data. There’s a good chance you have one, as they’re the de facto standard on desktop and laptop PCs. More specifically, ultra-fast NVMe M.2 SSDs have become popular, although slower SATA SSDs still have their place in older or cheaper systems.
Before SSDs, we relied on HDDs (hard disk drives), which store data on spinning magnetic disks called platters. HDDs are much slower than SSDs (even the most basic NVMe SSDs are 20 to 30 times faster), but offer a much lower cost per gigabyte of storage.
Due to their low price, hard drives are still widely used to store large files such as photos, videos and backups, especially when quick access is not essential. They also tend to be very reliable and data can often be recovered even if the drive fails. you could you don’t have one on your pcbut many people use HDD in their NAS (Network Attached Storage).
For a short time, there was a third type of storage called “SSHD”, which stands for Solid State Hybrid Drive. As the name suggests, it was a hybrid between an SSD and an HDD.
Basically, it was a regular hard drive with a small amount of NAND flash memory (like an SSD) built in to act as a cache for frequently accessed data.
The drive used an algorithm to determine frequently accessed files. The drive would then automatically move files in and out of the cache, allowing for faster boot and application loading times than a regular HDD without the cost of a full SSD.
While the idea sounded good on paper, the technology rarely lived up to it. Data on NAND flash memory was constantly overwritten, so performance remained at hard drive levels most of the time. You’ll only get close to SSD speeds when you repeatedly load the same app or boot your system multiple times in a row without opening anything else.
Instead of combining the best of both worlds, an SSHD mostly gave you the worst of both: a slow hard drive with only occasional glimpses of SSD-like performance, like quickly jumping back into a game of League of Legends after the game crashed.
Worse, because SSHDs still used platters for storage, they were noisy and just as sensitive to shock as regular HDDs. At the same time, flash memory added complexity to data recovery in the event of disk failure.
Cheap SSDs put an end to SSHDs
It’s a shame there are no cheap SSDs anymore
SATA SSDs slowly made their way to the mainstream consumer market in the late 2000s and early 2010s, but they were still quite expensive for the average user. That’s what made SSHDs attractive at the time: even if you couldn’t get the full speed of a real SSD, you could at least enjoy a slightly faster HDD without spending a lot more.
However, year after year, SSD prices fell rapidly to the point where it was difficult to justify not purchasing at least a 64GB SSD for your operating system, browser, and a few core applications, along with a separate hard drive for large files and games.
Being able to choose which apps benefited from faster loading times was reason enough to opt for an SSD+HDD setup instead of an SSHD.
In 2016, SSDs were affordable enough that even I, a broke high school student at the time, could save up and get a used 120GB SATA SSD for just $50. 120GB wasn’t a lot of storage space even a decade ago, but it was enough to store Windows, Chrome, and a couple of my favorite games.
SSDs continued to get drastically cheaper each year. Over time, they became a viable full replacement for older hard drives for people who don’t need a lot of storage and gamers who need ultra-fast loading speeds.
In the late 2010s and early 2020s, the vast majority of laptops, gaming PCs, and game consoles (such as the Xbox Series S|X and PlayStation 5) were sold not only with SSDs, but also the much faster NVMe variety.
Now that SSDs are affordable for everyone, there is simply no reason for SSHDs anymore, which is why they have quietly disappeared from the market.
Technology just couldn’t deliver on the promise
But it was great while it lasted, right?
Although SSHDs ultimately failed as a product, I still feel a bit nostalgic for them or, more precisely, the idea of them.
Although flash storage is cheap today, files have never been larger. A single video game can take up much more 100 GB of disk space. Add in some photos, videos, and maybe some Blu-Rays and lossless music files, and it’s easy to see how the average person can fill a ~$200 bag. 2TB NVMe Drive instantly.
Unfinished business?
If SSHDs came back and actually lived up to their promise while keeping the prices reasonable, I’d be the first to buy one. Unfortunately, that’s unlikely to happen, but we can still hope.
