What is a hybrid hard drive

Now only very far from computing people did not know what a hybrid hard drive. The fashion for combining several fundamentally different technologies into a single device is not new. For Example, cars in which for movement selectively uses the traditional internal combustion engine or electric drive, become quite familiar. It allows you to do “a little blood” with the gradual transfer of the technology to a new alternative. Hybrid hard drives fully comply with this rule. Let's take a more detailed look at this question.

Retired… or very much alive?

Currently, in the field of computers primary device for permanent information storage is a hard disk or Winchester (eng. HDD - hard disk drive). Its construction and principle of operation is quite simple: in a small metal enclosure placed several disks of nonconductive material. On all sides the surface of each of them is covered by sputtering a magnetic layer. The disks are strung on a common axis with sub-spindle, driven by the motor at a constant speed (in some models it can speed vary, depending on usage). A special mechanism moves the frame with the heads of record/reading on each of the parties. When recording portions of the surface are magnetized, and when reading, the process is reversed-the magnetic field induced current and converted by the controller into the data stream. For decades, technology applied, “growing pains” removed.

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Dark horse

However, with the formation of solid state memory, appeared on the market alternative solutions in which no rotating parts, and writing is performed by changing the position of the floating gate in the transistor. Such drives are called SSD (from the English. Solid-State Drive). Many believe that the media on the basis of solid state memory cells, whose performance significantly exceeds the speed of the HDD, gradually replacing the classic winchesters. While early to speak about global crossing (despite the fact that there are hybrid HDD). And here's why:

- the cost per Gigabyte of disk space from the SSD exceeds this parameter in the HDD (the ratio can be obtain by dividing price by capacity);

- reliability is not so clear, Each SSD is characterized by the maximum allowed number of cycles write/read;

- the technology is too new, constantly improved, so yesterday bought the device today may be hopelessly obsolete (take the support for the TRIM command).

Hybrid hard drive

Understanding that at the present time about a complete change in technology to speak prematurely, the producers proposed a compromise option of combining HDD and SDD. The basis for the design of such a device – magnetic disks (hard disk drives, with low cost and… not too impressive performance). Feature that hybrid hard drive also contains a chip and an SSD controller. Of course, hundreds of gigabytes can not speak, usually the volume is limited to a dozen. That is the main contribution from magnetic drives (e.g. 750 GB), SSD capacity-8GB, and of course the cache (32-64 MB). Hybrid hard drive at work copies the most popular data to faster solid-state memory, further working with her. In other words, the SSD in this decision – the second level cache.