HYBRID SSHD DRIVE DATA RECOVERY

Hybrid Hard Disk Drives or Solid State Hybrid Drives (SSHDs) are transitional block between conventional “spinners” (HDDs) and Solid State Drives (SSDs). HYBRIDs were widely used before SSD’s became more affordable. Now there is barely any HYBRIDS left. Hybrid SSHD is a regular spinning platter hard disk drive with added NAND memory chip, a so called BUFFER. This buffer stores most often accessible data. Some people call it CACHE. This creates confusion with CACHE RAM on same drive controller board. CACHE RAM is DDR SDRAM chip with capacity ranging from few Megabytes to 512MB on some fancier models. NAND BUFFER chips are much bigger in capacity and measured in Gigabytes. NAND chips help conserve power, generate less heat and lessen access times.

When drive gets request from HOST computer for data, controller checks if this data is available in NAND chip. If data is available, it gives it to the host computer without moving heads over the platters. Quick and easy. The biggest HYBRID SSHD NAND chip we have seen is 64GB, with 8GB or 16GB are usually used. They are cheaper. NAND Buffer memory is HEAVILY used. Because of this, some memory cells getting worn out and causing problems. CACHE RAM chips are heavily used too, but they build differently and dont die often. Drive controller and Firmware are programmed and designed to handle this at certain level. When errors become a “waterfall” or constant drive locks up or “freezes” to avoid data corruption and data loss. Blocking any read/write attempts to NAND memory or platters.

In this situation most likely BSY (Busy) flag will be raised and all activity stops. This indicates you will need to see a data recovery specialist or someone who knows how to deal with it properly. We have a whole lot of various images posted on our PINTEREST page. You are welcome to check them out. Different drive photos, drive damages, common HDD, SSHD and SSD problems. If you need help with your HYBRID SSHD drive you can CALL 720-319-7239 contact us HERE or via our FACEBOOK page. If calling, please leave a voice message, we DO get ALL messages.