4 ms·

Hybrid drives are a good call for professional graphic designers and video editors. I have moved my video editing efforts to hybrid drives because of price/spac

Hybrid drives are a good call for professional graphic designers and video editors. I have moved my video editing efforts to hybrid drives because of price/space ratios while maintaining performance. Pure SSDs only shine for gaming and compiling, and much more for the former than the later. A machine where you're constantly shuffling for space is no fun.

thebakeshow 10y ago
SSDs have a definite positive performance impact for editing photos, especially when using programs such as Lightroom that also manage photo libraries/databases
- vvanders 10y ago
  Actually Lightroom works well with hybrid drives. You're using going to be building 1:1 previews anyway on a fast scratch drive and RAWs on a cheap storage option. Any RAWs you're working with will be in ram anyway.
  - lips 10y ago
    Develop mode definitely hits your raws. I just switched from SSD(1)-boot/SSD(2)-cache/HDD(1)-raws to full SSD and the difference was substantial. This looks like an amazing experience, I'm just worried about performance in my workflow. That said, the future is bright.
6stringmerc 10y ago
Count audio as another environment where the hybrid drives make sense when paired with a suitable RAM amount. Nobody wants hiccups...but with the right USB 3.0 soundcard, RAM, and DAW, the output WAV files will stack up. Sure, uploading to cloud or network storage helps, but for general utility the hybrid scratches both performance and space itches.
barkingcat 10y ago
Pure SSD's have come down in price so much that it's irresponsible to spec out a computer for professional use without one. The SSD impacts every single aspect of computer performance - from startup times, to application start times, to swap space speed, to reducing times when the computer is locked up loading from disk. And these days, a 1 TB SSD can be had for around $300 USD - at which point, there is no obvious need for shuffling for space. Of course, if you are needing the 3 TB drives for video editing, that's fine. The surface studio specs say 1TB or 2TB - so even at such a high price, I find it really disappointing that it's not offering the 1 TB SSD (which is probably the first aftermarket change I would make if I bought one). For many 3D graphics pros, you would run the OS on a 512G SSD, and load the assets onto a larger 3TB hybrid drive or even better, a 10TB RAID array, for example, but you can't discount how much performance that SSD drive brings just for loading the OS and the software (Maya, or Adobe suite, etc) Face it - any new machine today without an ssd is one where the manufacture is trying to claw back some profit.
- KirinDave 10y ago
  Just for a note, those 1TB cheap SSDs are not very good or very compact SSDs. The new ones we associate with such stellar performance are still more expensive. This device has some pretty intense performance requirements for the form factor. Could we wait a bit for some hands-on with reviewers before saying MS botched it?
  - barkingcat 10y ago
    If you look at the form factor, the hybrid drive is most likely a 2.5 inch drive. As far as I know there are no hybrid drives in the compact ssd size (either m.2 or msata format - the spinning platter wouldn't even fit). Just by listing that it uses a hybrid drive, they are already revealing what the form factor is - which is larger than a m.2 slot, and therefore competes head to head with the last gen 2.5 inch SSD with the SATA connector - which at 1TB is around 300 bucks these days. And yes the SSD's are not as fast as the latest m.2 drives, but are still miles ahead of any spinning drive. I'm not really sure what you are trying to say ... like a Ferrari is faster than a Tesla in Ludicrous mode, so ... go for an electric hybrid like a Toyota Prius? I know that the car analogy doesn't always work, but can you think about your reasoning? That a true M.2 SSD (which can be thousands of dollars) is faster than a last gen 1TB SSD in the 2.5 inch form factor, so therefore MS should use a spinning hybrid drive??? You can wait for a teardown, or you can use logic and common sense. The only other choice is for MS to use a non standard size spinning platter, maybe around the old Compact Flash drive size - but in that case, there is absolutely no point - they should have just gone straight to M.2, especially for something in that form factor. To be honest, current generation hybrid drives pair up a really slow 5400 rpm drive with some flash. Now it can still get good performance, but in the end, you're dealing with a hard drive from a few generations ago. Seagate had 7200rpm hybrid drives last generation, but they recently changed to 5400 rpm drives, which makes the drive kinda slow, even with the flash addition. Microsoft may certainly have gone custom with custom parts, but I don't think they have the volume, even in the wildest expectations, to go against the now popular ssd juggernaunt that is overtaking all of the slim laptop (Apple, Lenovo, Dell, Razer, etc), small form factor embedded pc, and high performance pc space - for good reason. It just makes sense, the parts are really widely available, and people are expecting that type of performance.
maxxxxx 10y ago
I find pure SSDs much better than hybrid drives for photo editing. I don't think I would use a hybrid drive for any purpose now.
- stan_rogers 10y ago
  Try setting up a RAM disk as scratch. Scratch is where most of your I/O goes when editing, and an SSD can't touch a RAM disk for performance. PS (if that's what you're using) doesn't make much use of RAM above 8GB - it prefers scratch space at that point - so if you partition anything above that off for use as a "disk" you get a huge performance boost.
  - e12e 10y ago
    Having glanced at recent hw prices - for a desktop/workstation I'd say a reasonable baseline for new equipment for professional use would be 128gb ram, 1tb ssd and maybe a 10 tb 3.5 inch HD, if more space is needed (or a smaller drive, but the recent seagate offering looks pretty good value - even if you pay the customary ~2x/gb price [ed: for getting the largest capacity/newest drive on market] compared to a ~4tb drive): http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/pc-components/storage/disk-drives-hdd-ssd/seagate-ironwolf-10tb-hard-drive-1329977/review http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/pc-components/storag...
smrtinsert 10y ago
You're getting downvoted by zealots who are angry Apple still doesn't have (and won't anytime soon) a beautiful touch screen. Hybrids are totally fine in a great majority of use cases. For this price I agree you might as well have thrown one in, but still, performance difference will be neglible. As a dev I run an ssd because ides are shitty bloated awful pieces of crap (all of them tbh) they don't know how to run in memory and always spend time on file io.
- barkingcat 10y ago
  If you think professional graphics and 3d editing software aren't as bloated and shitty as IDE's then you are mistaken. Adobe CS suite ... that's a load of hot steaming garbage when you try to load it up. They are one of the really bad culprits causing designers and graphics pro's to need fast SSD's. Think having multiple copes of IntelliJ IDEA AND Eclipse running at the same time, and being saddled with poorly optimized code paths. (Because designers often need to run Photoshop and Illustrator, and sometimes Premiere as well for example, simultaneously) In fact, I think photoshop on a code quality level (loading, optimizations) is worse than Eclipse by a factor of 2. Designers have been getting around this by throwing brute force processing power, gpu, and SSD's at it. The image processing algorithms are top notch, that's why people buy it - but everything around it ... the ui, widgets, update framework, a ton of it is creaking old and really poorly maintained.
r00fus 10y ago
Hybrid drives are noticably slower than SSD for a lot of use cases. It's like saying a USB2 part is good enough when USB3 is pervasive, expected, and not that much pricier. SSDs (and preferably PCIe or NVMe) should be table stakes at a $2k price.
- KirinDave 10y ago
  It'd not though because the price per GB is still pretty big. A lot of people here are talking as if they've actually tested these hybrid drives and found them wanting. Hybrid drives have an SSD-like component so as long as your working set fits in those and is relatively predictable, the performance difference is not noticeable.

thebakeshow 10y ago

SSDs have a definite positive performance impact for editing photos, especially when using programs such as Lightroom that also manage photo libraries/databases

vvanders 10y ago
Actually Lightroom works well with hybrid drives. You're using going to be building 1:1 previews anyway on a fast scratch drive and RAWs on a cheap storage option. Any RAWs you're working with will be in ram anyway.
- lips 10y ago
  Develop mode definitely hits your raws. I just switched from SSD(1)-boot/SSD(2)-cache/HDD(1)-raws to full SSD and the difference was substantial. This looks like an amazing experience, I'm just worried about performance in my workflow. That said, the future is bright.

6stringmerc 10y ago

Count audio as another environment where the hybrid drives make sense when paired with a suitable RAM amount. Nobody wants hiccups...but with the right USB 3.0 soundcard, RAM, and DAW, the output WAV files will stack up. Sure, uploading to cloud or network storage helps, but for general utility the hybrid scratches both performance and space itches.

barkingcat 10y ago

Pure SSD's have come down in price so much that it's irresponsible to spec out a computer for professional use without one. The SSD impacts every single aspect of computer performance - from startup times, to application start times, to swap space speed, to reducing times when the computer is locked up loading from disk. And these days, a 1 TB SSD can be had for around $300 USD - at which point, there is no obvious need for shuffling for space. Of course, if you are needing the 3 TB drives for video editing, that's fine. The surface studio specs say 1TB or 2TB - so even at such a high price, I find it really disappointing that it's not offering the 1 TB SSD (which is probably the first aftermarket change I would make if I bought one). For many 3D graphics pros, you would run the OS on a 512G SSD, and load the assets onto a larger 3TB hybrid drive or even better, a 10TB RAID array, for example, but you can't discount how much performance that SSD drive brings just for loading the OS and the software (Maya, or Adobe suite, etc) Face it - any new machine today without an ssd is one where the manufacture is trying to claw back some profit.

KirinDave 10y ago
Just for a note, those 1TB cheap SSDs are not very good or very compact SSDs. The new ones we associate with such stellar performance are still more expensive. This device has some pretty intense performance requirements for the form factor. Could we wait a bit for some hands-on with reviewers before saying MS botched it?
- barkingcat 10y ago
  If you look at the form factor, the hybrid drive is most likely a 2.5 inch drive. As far as I know there are no hybrid drives in the compact ssd size (either m.2 or msata format - the spinning platter wouldn't even fit). Just by listing that it uses a hybrid drive, they are already revealing what the form factor is - which is larger than a m.2 slot, and therefore competes head to head with the last gen 2.5 inch SSD with the SATA connector - which at 1TB is around 300 bucks these days. And yes the SSD's are not as fast as the latest m.2 drives, but are still miles ahead of any spinning drive. I'm not really sure what you are trying to say ... like a Ferrari is faster than a Tesla in Ludicrous mode, so ... go for an electric hybrid like a Toyota Prius? I know that the car analogy doesn't always work, but can you think about your reasoning? That a true M.2 SSD (which can be thousands of dollars) is faster than a last gen 1TB SSD in the 2.5 inch form factor, so therefore MS should use a spinning hybrid drive??? You can wait for a teardown, or you can use logic and common sense. The only other choice is for MS to use a non standard size spinning platter, maybe around the old Compact Flash drive size - but in that case, there is absolutely no point - they should have just gone straight to M.2, especially for something in that form factor. To be honest, current generation hybrid drives pair up a really slow 5400 rpm drive with some flash. Now it can still get good performance, but in the end, you're dealing with a hard drive from a few generations ago. Seagate had 7200rpm hybrid drives last generation, but they recently changed to 5400 rpm drives, which makes the drive kinda slow, even with the flash addition. Microsoft may certainly have gone custom with custom parts, but I don't think they have the volume, even in the wildest expectations, to go against the now popular ssd juggernaunt that is overtaking all of the slim laptop (Apple, Lenovo, Dell, Razer, etc), small form factor embedded pc, and high performance pc space - for good reason. It just makes sense, the parts are really widely available, and people are expecting that type of performance.

maxxxxx 10y ago

I find pure SSDs much better than hybrid drives for photo editing. I don't think I would use a hybrid drive for any purpose now.

stan_rogers 10y ago
Try setting up a RAM disk as scratch. Scratch is where most of your I/O goes when editing, and an SSD can't touch a RAM disk for performance. PS (if that's what you're using) doesn't make much use of RAM above 8GB - it prefers scratch space at that point - so if you partition anything above that off for use as a "disk" you get a huge performance boost.
- e12e 10y ago
  Having glanced at recent hw prices - for a desktop/workstation I'd say a reasonable baseline for new equipment for professional use would be 128gb ram, 1tb ssd and maybe a 10 tb 3.5 inch HD, if more space is needed (or a smaller drive, but the recent seagate offering looks pretty good value - even if you pay the customary ~2x/gb price [ed: for getting the largest capacity/newest drive on market] compared to a ~4tb drive): http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/pc-components/storage/disk-drives-hdd-ssd/seagate-ironwolf-10tb-hard-drive-1329977/review http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/pc-components/storag...

smrtinsert 10y ago

You're getting downvoted by zealots who are angry Apple still doesn't have (and won't anytime soon) a beautiful touch screen. Hybrids are totally fine in a great majority of use cases. For this price I agree you might as well have thrown one in, but still, performance difference will be neglible. As a dev I run an ssd because ides are shitty bloated awful pieces of crap (all of them tbh) they don't know how to run in memory and always spend time on file io.

barkingcat 10y ago
If you think professional graphics and 3d editing software aren't as bloated and shitty as IDE's then you are mistaken. Adobe CS suite ... that's a load of hot steaming garbage when you try to load it up. They are one of the really bad culprits causing designers and graphics pro's to need fast SSD's. Think having multiple copes of IntelliJ IDEA AND Eclipse running at the same time, and being saddled with poorly optimized code paths. (Because designers often need to run Photoshop and Illustrator, and sometimes Premiere as well for example, simultaneously) In fact, I think photoshop on a code quality level (loading, optimizations) is worse than Eclipse by a factor of 2. Designers have been getting around this by throwing brute force processing power, gpu, and SSD's at it. The image processing algorithms are top notch, that's why people buy it - but everything around it ... the ui, widgets, update framework, a ton of it is creaking old and really poorly maintained.

r00fus 10y ago

Hybrid drives are noticably slower than SSD for a lot of use cases. It's like saying a USB2 part is good enough when USB3 is pervasive, expected, and not that much pricier. SSDs (and preferably PCIe or NVMe) should be table stakes at a $2k price.

KirinDave 10y ago
It'd not though because the price per GB is still pretty big. A lot of people here are talking as if they've actually tested these hybrid drives and found them wanting. Hybrid drives have an SSD-like component so as long as your working set fits in those and is relatively predictable, the performance difference is not noticeable.