Using SSHD's rather than SSD for Jails?

[brashquido]

Hi All,
Currently using a single old 120GB SSD for hosting my FreeNas jails and looking to upgrade to get more capacity. I am running VirtualBox (2 Vm's only), CrashPlan, SabNZB, Sickbeard & CouchPotato, so likely to be a moderate level of IOPS. SabNZB is really going to be the only jail with significant hit on the disk where I've tried to minimize the random I/O load by setting it to use 1GB or RAM before flushing to disk.
I was at first thinking about a single 500GB SSD, however for roughly the same money I could purchase 2 x Seagate ST1000LM014 1TB SSHD's and put them in a mirror so I have some level of redundancy as well as twice the space. Redundancy is not terribly important as the data is not critical and CrashPlan backs that volume up anyway, the extra space would definitely be handy though.
Anyone have any thoughts on the Seagate ST1000LM014 SSHD for this purpose?

 

[dlavigne]

Did you make a decision on this and if so, how did it work out?

 

[jgreco]

I'll note that we've been using the Momentus XT 500GB's here for a number of years with a lot of success. It's very difficult to quantify how the caching effects impact overall operation, but I do note that they are a little zippier than some of the datastores we've run on non-SSHD 500GB drives with otherwise similar specs. And we're running them in RAID1 as ESXi datastores, so we're punishing the crap out of them compared to their intended use case.

The current generation runs at a lower rotational speed (5900 IIRC) but has the same cache size. I probably wouldn't go out of my way to buy them, but if all other things are relatively equal, the SSHD is nicer than the non-SSHD.

 

[brashquido]

I had actually pulled the Momentus XT 500GB from my old laptop, however it was reporting a SMART error so ended up going for 2 x Seagate ST500LM000 500GB in a mirror. I found this review covering many of the current notebook HDD options and the Momentus XT's did well with exception of random IO. If you have sufficient system memory, not sure how much this matters with ZFS. Have not put the new drives through their paces yet, however general feel is about the same as the SSD.