Advice | Hybrid Drives For Sample Library Storage

[Simeon Amburgey]

As I am seemingly finding the number of sample libraries growing my storage space is shrinking. I see that SSD prices are coming down and probably will continue to do so; my question is are Hybrid Hard-drive/SSDs viable as well as the cost per gigabyte seems to be pretty reasonable. Just wondering what others might have experienced using this type of drive?

Thanks so much!

 

[msmcleod]

Hybrid drives work by having a very small SSD inside which holds copies of the most used files.

On my old laptop, I originally swapped to a hybrid drive before going full SSD.  As an OS drive, I found the speed increase from HDD to hybrid far more obvious than from hybrid to SSD - in other words, it was almost as fast as an SSD for most things.

The only drawback, was when I did a Windows update, sometimes it would take up to a day or two for it to catch up and replace its "most used files" cache - obviously depending on what was updated (i.e. sometimes it was fine).

As the cost in most cases is pretty similar to a standard drive, it's really a no-brainer, but just be aware that on occasions it'll revert back to normal HDD speed every now and then as the cache changes.