While SSDs and traditional hard drives have continued to fall in price, the price gap between them remains large. If you want some of the speed benefits of SSDs at a price closer to hard drives, this early Black Friday deal might interest you. One 2.5-inch 2TB 'hybrid' drive from Seagate is now $60 in the US ($27 off usual price) and £68 in the UK (about £17 off).
Regular 2TB SSDs usually go for around $200 these days, so this 2TB hybrid drive for a fourth of the price is awfully tempting. But how is performance, you may ask? Our friends at Windows Central ran some benchmarks, and found the drive achieved around 133 MB/s in sequential reads, and 131 MB/s in seq. writes. That's certainly slower than most SATA SSDs, which usually operate at around 500 MB/s for reads and writes, but it comes out slightly ahead of traditional hard drives.
Hybrid drives like this one combine a regular hard drive with a small amount of flash memory, moving commonly-accessed files (like Windows system files) to the faster flash storage, and leaving other data (like games) on the slower HDD. This specific model is a 2.5-inch drive, so it can fit inside laptops, game consoles, and anything else that accepts small SATA drives.
