I have 2 disks in my laptop Samsung ssd and normal HDD.
The second disk mostly used as a storage rather than fast io disk. It was going bad, and became bad.
To bye a big SSD for me make no sense my laptop supports only SATA2 and it is already 5 years old.
Recently I decided to replace the second HDD to hybrid one: ST1000LM014-1EJ164 ATA Device.
It has a 1TB storage with 8GB ssd inside for only 92EUR(cool!).
Let us see the performance between SSD and SSHD with CrystalDiskMark 3.0.2:
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CrystalDiskMark 3.0.2 x64 (C) 2007-2013 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
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* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]
Sequential Read : 109.523 MB/s
Sequential Write : 109.937 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 41.080 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 86.506 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 0.724 MB/s [ 176.7 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 1.012 MB/s [ 247.2 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 1.898 MB/s [ 463.3 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 1.024 MB/s [ 250.1 IOPS]
Test : 1000 MB [D: 20.9% (195.0/931.5 GB)] (x5)
Date : 2015/05/04 12:32:21
OS : Windows 7 Home Premium Edition SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)
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CrystalDiskMark 3.0.2 x64 (C) 2007-2013 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
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* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]
Sequential Read : 250.616 MB/s
Sequential Write : 233.874 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 201.951 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 154.954 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 13.728 MB/s [ 3351.6 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 23.077 MB/s [ 5634.0 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 99.181 MB/s [ 24214.1 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 68.726 MB/s [ 16778.8 IOPS]
Test : 1000 MB [C: 96.6% (230.3/238.5 GB)] (x5)
Date : 2015/05/04 12:38:47
OS : Windows 7 Home Premium Edition SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)
In some cases my SSHD is 2 time slower that SSD but price is very reasonable: 0.09Euro/GB vs Samsung SSD 0.44Euro/GB
So price efficiency is about ~5times more for SSHD.
For sure for some loads ssd is better than SSHD becouse it brings about 52 times more IOPs in 4KB tests. As a archive SSHD is better than normal HDD, byt for virtual machines and DB applications better to use SSDs.
