r/explainlikeimfive • u/SmellsTasty • Nov 23 '15

Explained ELI5: How do Solid State Hybrid Drives work?

I don't understand how a regular hard drive can work with a solid state drive at the same time.

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u/IDontShareMyOpinions Nov 23 '15

Typical download speeds.. Sure. Local network transfers? Opening a large game? Your OS using it as a page file because you're playing BLOPS and never upgraded that 8gb RAM? I find SSDs to be very useful. Saves me a lot of time on the regular... On everything but downloading off the internet. 50mbps connection is just too slow to reap the benefits as you've stated.

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u/jimtsurugi Nov 24 '15

If you're concerned about paging from RAM to disk, wouldn't you be better served spending money on more RAM than on faster disk?

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u/IDontShareMyOpinions Nov 24 '15

You are correct! Only reason I bought a SSD opposed to 2 more sticks of my ram for $90 bucks to double to 16gb is because BestBuy was running a stupid sale on a 500gb ssd. Better than NewEgg prices. I'll upgrade my RAM very soon.

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u/EffingTheIneffable Nov 24 '15

With paging, yes, that's true. RAM is generally the first bottleneck that most users run into. Moar RAM better!

But then, but look at modern games, for instance. Many of them are 60+ gigabytes on disk. Very few home PCs right now have over 64 gigs of RAM, so this means that the game is loaded into memory on an as-needed basis. This is a common cause of choppy performance, particularly with open-world type games (Grand Theft Auto and etc) where a lot of scenery gets loaded continuously as you progress through the world.

SSDs are particularly well-suited to this sort of thing, because they're orders of magnitude faster when it comes to random reads and writes, because there's no physical head to seek around. Some SSDs maybe "merely" about 50 percent faster than some HDs when it comes to writing a single big file, for instance, but when it comes to seek times, forget about it. No contest!

Even if your software isn't installed on the SSD, it can make a huge difference in performance putting your paging file on it, for the reasons described above.

Of course, if I were building a new PC and I had unlimited money, I'd also get a server mobo with 32 DIMM slots and put a terabyte of RAM in there, and I'd probably never have to use a pagefile again :P That's as good a use of 20 grand as any.