Is 8GB SSD Enough?

by Paul | Last Updated: July 5, 2022

Unless you are cash trapped it is advisable to at less than 8GB, even if you are not planning to do anything with your computer beyond basic activity web browsing and watching good quality YouTube videos.

Is 8GB SSD enough?

Just in case you got lost, wondering why this question is being asked in the age and time. Well, we are still in the 21st century and an 8GB SSD is useless in today’s use for storage in a system, not to talk about gaming.

This 8GB SSD is cache storage, let me break it down a little.

It starts with the CPU, where there is a tiny little bit of storage, that is lightning fast, we are talking nanoseconds, frequently used data that your computer needs go there.

Next, we have RAM which is orders of magnitude more storage, but it is not nearly as fast as CPU cache, but it is much faster than

Most computers still run a mechanical hard drive, which is orders of magnitude, larger in capacity in something like memory, but orders of magnitude slower as well.

Where an SSD cache comes in, it is like strapping something that is in between RAM, in mechanical hard drives to the system. The system can dynamically, automatically, intelligently, take the data that it needs most often, but not that often and kept it on an SSD

The 8GB SSD is great for things like applications or games where it is a huge amount of data but you want fast loading time.

This solution is great for something like a notebook where you have to separate drives going into it the devices.

But if we had something, that integrated both of these concepts, into one small device called a Hybrid drive or an SSHD

SSHD has a hard drive inside and SSD components, that are never visible to the end-user, it just behaves like a faster hard drive, but it does not end there.

This technology scales to the enterprise, where these huge arrays of SSD may be backing up even more massive arrays of hard drives, that is what keeps pages like Facebook, loading extremely quickly, without the company completely running out of space to store all the photos, data that gets uploaded to it.

The hard drive is big and cheap, the SSD is small and expensive. This is where the marriage of the two drives makes a lot of sense, performance is not going to be as fast as a purely based SSD system but it is going to be much faster than a hard-drive-based system, particularly for your frequently used applications of data.

SSDs have taken the world by storm and they show no signs of slowing down. They have all but evicted HDDs from  most

Many common tasks are quickly becoming memory hug, even google chrome can eat into your memory very, if you got a few tabs open and while the browser uses a technique called tab discarding, which removes unused tabs from memory and reloads them when you access them, you will notice a smooth experience.

Having your cake and eating it too, can be stuff to pull off, that is true when it comes to computer components, builders have to deal with the internal balancing act of price and performance.

In particular, storage presents us with two diametrically posing choices, I want the speed of an SSD at a higher price or the capacity of a hard drive that comes with slower performance.

The most desktop can easily fit one of each, which is a popular compromise, what of if you have a laptop with only one drive slot or you just really care about having your OS and a few important applications launch quickly and you do not mind waiting extra seconds to load your library.

In that case, your Solid State Hybrid Drive or an SSHD might be the right choice for you, they are not called that because they run off a mix of gasoline and electricity, just think of the fumes that will build up inside your case, but because they contain both spinning this platter like you will find in a traditional hard drive and the same NAND flash and a controller you find in an SSD.

HDD can seem similar to hard drives. They use the same 2 and a half or 3 and a half form inch factor, and plug into a single SATA port, inside a special controller that manages both the NAND flash and the magnetic platter, so the hybrid drive appears as just one drive in your operating system.

Rather than a separate drive in the SSD. The firmware is also in charge of determining what data will be stored in the flash cells, quicker access, and what will be placed under the slower spinning platters.

Overtime the drive will learn what files are accessed most frequently and will automatically place those files in flash memory for you, no input from the user is required

The all in one convenience of a hybrid drive does come with some limitations, the flash memory capacity is quite small, typically no more than 32GB, so if you need quick access to lots of programs and data a full-fat SSD paired with a conventional hard drive, maybe a better set up for you

Hybrid Drives will also not give you the performance boost from the flat storage right off the bat, since they have to take time to learn, what data should be put in the NAN cells for quick access.

They start out being not much, if at all faster than the regular mechanical drive. Unfortunately, you can not manually tell a typical SSHD, to place specific things on the flash portion.

You still get the advantages of paying much less than you would for a standard SSD as well as ease of use for novice users or thinkers, who want a performance boost without having to deal with multiple drives or deciding what needs to go somewhere on their own.

If you need a lot of relatively cheap storage with a little extra quality for your next upgrade do not overlook, hybrid drives.