Can a hybrid drive be used as two separate drives? For example, is it possible to install the OS in the SSD portion and use the HDD for large media files? Will the SSD's performance be negatively impacted since both the SSD and HDD are sharing the same SATA cable (and thus less bandwidth for the SSD when writing/reading from both drives)?
Can hybrid drives be used as two separate drives
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Related Solutions
With those specs, let's say you're talking about the Seagate Momentus XT. AnandTech has an informative review of the drive. Excerpt:
The size of the NAND was a shocker to me when I first heard it. I honestly expected something much larger. In the Momentus XT however, the SLC NAND acts exclusively as a read cache - writes never touch the NAND. The drive looks at access patterns over time (most likely via a history table of LBAs and their frequency of access) and pulls some data into the NAND. If a read request comes in for an LBA that is present in the NAND, it's serviced out of the 4GB chip. If the LBA isn't present in the NAND, the data comes from the platters.
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The potential for hybrid drives continues to be huge, what Seagate has shown here is that with a minimal amount of NAND you can achieve some tremendous performance gains. There's no reason for any performance oriented mechanical drive to ship without at least some small amount of NAND on board. There's also much room for Seagate to innovate. We could see drives with more NAND or truly hybrid drives that provide read and write caching in NAND.
For a real world example, I just upgraded to this drive recently on my MacBook and can attest that the OS and my main applications load up much faster.
Given that hybrid hard drives like the Momentus® XT never really took off (there was only one manufacturer, so tier 1 OEMs did not want to use them, plus the drives only cached reads anyway), it looks like there are limited options for SSD hard drive caching, an add in SATA card or a software solution.
SSHD / Hybrid drives
If you need more capacity but don't want to go full SSD, an SSHD might be an option.
More recent drives like the Seagate 3rd generation solid state hybrid drive (SSHD) look more promising than the original offerings, but there are trade-offs. They can allegedly cache some writes, but at the moment they still have very little flash (8GB MLC, with a small portion of the NAND set aside for use in SLC mode, similar to SanDisk’s nCache) and they are only 5400rpm drives.
These days more manufacturers are selling hybrid drives (after rebranding them as SSHD, which sounds deceptively close to SSD) but they are still only 5400rpm laptop SATA drives, no more than 4TB in size, and they still only have 8GB of flash.
Caching an hard drive with an SSD
Unfortunately, none of the options have anywhere near the performance of an SSD. At best you get performance closer to HD than SSD and at worst you get performance which is even lower than the HD on it's own!
On the plus side, if you are upgrading an old SSD then using that old SSD to cache your large storage drive could be a worthwhile option. SSD caching seems to benefit much less from newer, faster SSDs so you get most of the caching benefit from older, relatively slow SSDs.
Add-in SATA cards
One option is an add-in SATA card which can provide this functionality. I believe there are enterprise level solutions for this, but as they are well out of my price range I haven't researched them. The HighPoint RocketHybrid 1220 is much more affordable though, and there is a nice article about this on Tom's Hardware Guide.
My experience with the Add-in SATA card option.
Having seen the Add-in SATA card option in action, I have to say that I'm not impressed with the Marvell 88SE9130 based card that I bought. HyperDuo was incredibly unreliable, the software kept crashing and the performance was rarely higher than the underlying hard drive on its own, even after hours of 'optimisation'.
Even using the card as a 6Gbps SATA III port resulted in worse performance with an Adata S511 SSD than just using the on-board 3Gbps SATA II ports.
Intel Smart Response Technology (requires motherboard support)
Another option is a motherboard with support for Intel Smart Response Technology (which started with the Intel Z68 chipset). Again, THG has a nice article providing an overview of what we can expect of the SSD caching capabilities of this and newer chipsets.
My experience with the Intel SRT option.
After having had the opportunity to play with a Z68 based motherboard, I was even less impressed with Intel Smart Response Technology than I was with HyperDuo!
At the time Smart Response Technology could only cache a Windows boot drive, so you couldn't have an SSD Boot drive and then use SRT to cache another drive in your system. You had to install Windows on the hard drive, install drivers, then the Intel® Rapid Storage Technology (RST) software and then add the SSD. At this point, if you were lucky then you would be able to see a new "Accelerate" tab on the RST application and if not then you may have to start the whole process from scratch to try and get it to work.
Apparently (thanks Nicholas) more recent versions of RST are substantially better. I haven't tried this yet, but apparently you can now cache a non boot hard drive as long as you start with a completely blank SSD (no partitions). You are still limited to 60GB of cache, but once the drive is set up as a cache, the remainder of the drive can be configured as a normal partition. Sadly you are still limited to caching a single drive or raid array.
Alternative software caching options
The last option is a non-Intel software caching solution, like Dataplex, which was bundled with the OCZ Synapse SSD. Unfortunately, this solution (like Intels SRT) only supported caching a single boot drive, so the only benefit was that it doesn't require a Z68 motherboard.
Unfortunately, I have yet to see a review from a site whose methodology I trust, so I can't tell how this option compares with SRT or the add-in card option.
Final option: Don't bother, just manage your storage manually
Fire and forget solutions are all well and good, but sometimes it's just easier to manage these things yourself. Use your SSD and hard drive as separate drives, put stuff that you don't need fast access to on the HD and stuff that do on your SSD. Move things between them as and when you need to.
Tools like NTFS symbolic links, SSD Boost Manager and Folder2Junction could all help. See my answer to Trying to make SSD boot drive with Windows 7 and old drive is not accessible for more details.
Best Answer
If you are talking about the Seagate hybrid drives (and those are the only ones I know off which use that name at the time I originally wrote this), then No.
The drive just acts as a single regular harddisk. The firmware on the drive keeps track of which sectors get read a lot and moves those to the flash cache. It handles that completely independent of the OS and the OS only sees one normal HDD.
However there are also situations where a small SSD and a regular HDD are added to the system and software is used to tie them together. These can be configured either as two independent disks are as one disk with caching. To configure and use this you will need software/drivers. I have now heard these referred to as 'hybrid drives' even though that makes no sense to me. I would just call them 'two drives, one of which is a plain drive but very small and thus mostly useful for caching'. This might be due to packaging where the two drives are somehow delivered as one physical unit.