Summary
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SSHDs paired an HDD with a small NAND cache for faster speeds, but that idea didn’t catch on.
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SSD prices fell rapidly, causing SSHDs to disappear from the market.
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I’m nostalgic for SSHDs, but a proper throwback isn’t possible.
A little over a decade ago, the price of SSDs began to drop, making them a viable storage option for consumer PCs and offering significantly faster performance than traditional HDDs.
However, their price remained several times higher than standard HDDs, which prompted manufacturers to develop a new, hybrid solution: SSHD. Unfortunately, he never followed through on his promise.
SSHDs have over-promised and under-delivered
A classic tech tale
SSDs (Solid State Drives) are a type of drive that uses fast flash memory to store data. Chances are you own one because they are the de facto standard on desktop and laptop computers. More specifically, ultra-fast NVMe M.2 SSDs have become mainstream, although slower SATA SSDs are still found in older or more budget-friendly systems.
Before SSDs, we relied on HDDs (Hard Disk Drives), which stored data on rotating magnetic discs called disks. HDDs are much slower than SSDs (even the simplest NVMe SSDs are 20-30 times faster), but they offer a much lower cost per gigabyte of storage.
Due to their low cost, HDDs are still widely used for storing large files such as photos, videos, and backups, especially when fast access is not critical. They also tend to be highly reliable, and even if a drive fails, data can often be recovered. you can your computer doesn’t have onebut many people use HDDs 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 SSD and HDD.
Basically, it was a regular HDD with a small amount of NAND flash memory (like an SSD) installed to act as a cache for frequently accessed data.
The driver used an algorithm to identify frequently accessed files. The drive then automatically moves files in and out of the cache, allowing for faster boot and app load times than a conventional HDD without the cost of a full SSD.
While the idea sounded good on paper, the technology rarely matched it. The data on the NAND flash would be constantly overwritten, so most of the time performance remained at HDD levels. If you load the same program over and over, or load your system multiple times in a row without opening anything else, you’d approach SSD speeds.
Instead of combining the best of both worlds, an SSHD basically gave you the worst of both: a slow HDD that only occasionally saw SSD-like performance – like speeding back to a match, for example. League of Legends after the game crashes.
Worse, because SSHDs still used platters for storage, they were just as loud and susceptible to shocks as regular HDDs. At the same time, flash memory added complexity to data recovery in case of disk failure.
Cheap SSDs killed SSHDs
Unfortunately, there are no cheaper SSDs
SATA SSDs slowly entered 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 so attractive back then—even if you can’t get the full speed of a true SSD, you can at least enjoy a slightly faster HDD without spending too much.
However, SSD prices have dropped so fast year after year that it was hard to justify not getting at least a 64GB SSD for your operating system, browser, and a few basic apps, and a separate HDD for big files and games.
Being able to choose which apps benefited from faster boot times was reason enough to choose an SSD+HDD setup over SSHD.
By 2016, SSDs were affordable enough that even I, a high school student at the time, could save up and buy a used 120GB SATA SSD for only $50. 120GB wasn’t a lot of memory even a decade ago, but it was enough to store Windows, Chrome and a few favorite games.
SSDs continued to drop in price dramatically every year. They eventually became a complete replacement for older HDDs for people who don’t need a lot of storage and gamers who need ultra-fast download 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) shipped not only with SSDs, but also with the faster NVMe variety.
Now that SSDs are affordable for everyone, there’s simply no reason for SSHDs, so they’ve quietly disappeared from the market.
The technology simply failed to deliver on the promise
But it was cool while it lasted, right?
Even though SSHDs ultimately failed as a product, I’m still a little nostalgic about them, or rather the idea of them.
Although flash memory is cheap today, files have never been so large. A single video game can take up a lot of space 100 GB disk space. Throw in some photos, videos, and maybe a few Blu-Rays and lossless music files, and it’s easy to see how the average person could fill ~$200. 2TB NVMe drive never.
Unfinished business?
If SSHDs were to come back and keep their promise of keeping the prices reasonable, I’d be first in line to buy them. Unfortunately, this is unlikely to happen, but one can still hope.
