Whenever you are choosing a hard drive today, there would always be a conundrum. Do you choose the higher speed of the SSD, buy pay more or the slower but cheaper mechanical drive that also has more space?
Well because of that the SSHD is born. SSHD, or Solid State Hybrid Drives in theory is the marriage of both worlds, where a mechanical hard drive with a large storage is combined with a SSD chip to give fast access to data while still be cheap.
One of the latest SSHD drives to hit the market is the Western Digital Blue PC SSHD that comes with either 1TB or 4TB of storage, as well as 8GB of NAND SSD. We recently received the 4TB version from Western Digital.
BLUE BLINK
The 4TB drive that we have comes in the standard desktop-sized 3.5-inch flavour. Note that the 1TB version uses the smaller, laptop friendly 2.5-inch size instead. At first glance, the drive looks similar to your everyday mechanical hard drive that is large, bulky and extremely heavy. The difference that one might notice on the Western Digital Blue PC SSHD 4TB is the rather large controller PCB on the bottom of the drive.
Indeed, the 8GB of NAND that comes with the drive resides on this PCB. The NAND is controlled by a JMicron controller that is the heart and soul of this hard drive. How so? Well the hard drive will learn and adapt automatically to your usage. It will try to fill up the NAND with files that you usually would access and in theory would be instantly there for you whenever you need them.
REAL LIFE
While the Western Digital Blue PC SSHD 4TB could be used as a boot device, meaning the OS is installed in it, we decided to forego that as we feel the 8GB NAND is not enough for both OS and applications. Instead we used it as a storage for gaming and movies/videos, to see how fast files can be transferred and games can be loaded.
What we found out is that it takes a while for the NAND and the drive to fully work together. But once it does, they tend to work well. Games do load faster than a normal mechanical drive, and compared to our normal drive, we could read/write data faster as well.
PARTING WORDS
The Western Digital Blue PC SSHD 4TB drive is quite a good piece of hardware if you want to have a fast performing drive but are unwilling to spend a lot on SSD. While it might not be as fast as a real SSD, you won’t find a 4TB SSD in this kind of price range anytime soon. It’s perfect for storage and accessing those files that you need quickly.
Verdict: High performance for a low price
Value: 9/10
Features: 7.5/10
Performance: 9/10
Design: 8/10
Usability: 9/10
Total 8.5/10
