4 reasons SSHDs were never a viable replacement for HDDs or SSDs

Between the proliferation of SSDs and the drawn-out death of HDDs, there was a weird cross-over of the two that briefly took hold of the enthusiast community: SSHDs. Solid State Hybrid Drives were a type of storage device that combined an HDD with an SSD, with the expectation that it would be a viable compromise between the two technologies given the cost of SSDs. However, SSHDs are really nowhere to be seen these days, and there are a few reasons why.

As a primer, SSHDs essentially offered high-speed caching, as they contained a small amount of SSD storage. This meant frequently accessed data could be accessed again quickly, while still benefitting from the cheap storage of a large HDD. They were nowhere near as fast as true SSDs, but there were some minor improvements over HDDs that were noticeable.

4 Decreasing SSD costs

This was the big one

When HDDs were going out and SSDs were coming in, there was one major downside to SSDs: cost. They would set you back a pretty penny for something that consumers weren’t convinced was necessary. Even then, if you wanted faster boot times, it was common to buy a small SSD, install Windows on it, and then use your HDD to store everything else.

However, SSD prices eventually went into freefall, and it meant that they suddenly became affordable for your everyday consumer. That, along with the speed benefits an SSD gave, meant that it was a no-brainer for people to just buy large SSDs instead of getting an SSHD or buying a small SSD just for Windows. Nowadays, many of the best SSDs will still be cheaper than some of the most mediocre ones a decade ago.

3 More SSD capacity

You can now get several terabytes in an SSD

Back when SSDs were taking off, it wasn’t uncommon to see SSDs with as little as 32GB of storage. These were very small, but they’d also set you back a decent bit considering the cost. 512GB was essentially an upper limit in storage space, and 1TB was practically unheard of. That changed over time, though, and now you can get SSDs that are several terabytes in size.

Why this was important is that users didn’t want to have to switch between multiple drives depending on what they were doing or where their Windows install was. Now, with bigger SSD sizes, it’s easier to just install Windows, install your programs, and not need to worry about organization. HDDs still typically come with more storage for cheaper, but SSDs have improved a lot since then.

2 Lack of performance improvements

SSDs were significantly better

While SSHDs were faster than HDDs, they still couldn’t light a candle to a true SSD. They were more expensive and weren’t really worth it for most people, and those who cared about performance in that way just went ahead and bought a cheap SSD for booting instead. You didn’t need an SSHD, and when SSD prices came down and SSD storage space began to rise, it just made sense to go and get an SSD instead of a hybrid between the two that was more HDD than SSD.

With an SSD, it’s still to this dayone of the best upgrades you can make to any computer or laptop if it doesn’t have one already. That wasn’t really the case with an SSHD. That’s how big of a delta there is between SSDs to SSHDs and SSHDs to HDDs.

1 SSHDs were notoriously fragile

They were super easy to break

SSHDs had more components than a regular SSD or HDD, meaning that there was more that could break. You had the fragility of an HDD’s spinning disk with the short lifecycle of a cheap, old SSD, combining the worst of both worlds. The SSD in those drives would be written to constantly, significantly more than a regular SSD, and it meant this portion of the drive could break with ease due to excessive writes.

To make matters worse, many controllers at the time didn’t account for this potential failure point. If the controller didn’t recognize the SSD cache had died, they didn’t usually write straight to the HDD from there, they just failed outright. This meant that the physical HDD part of the drive might have been fine, but the SSD acting as a cache had failed and therefore prevented the entire drive from being used.

In other words, you couldn’t even rely on an SSHD to hold your data reliably or to be used for a long time. This was a hard sell to consumers, too.

SSHDs never deserved to take off

To be honest, SSHDs were pretty terrible, and it’s a good thing they never took off. They had a lot of downsides, and being budget-oriented, they often contained cheap flash storage that would die pretty quickly, while not offering a huge amount of benefit. Now that SSD prices are down, it’s significantly more viable to only have SSDs, and the vast majority of enthusiasts probably do these days.

Still, there was a weird time when SSHDs were starting to grow a bit, and I remember having one inside my old PC. I eventually went the route of a small SSD and a big HDD, but nowadays that isn’t necessary either.