Hey Sunny, welcome to MonsterFishKeepers...
That sonds like a great topic for a thread but it's a bit off topic for this thread. Feel free to start a new thread with this as a topic and I'm sure quite a few people will chime in to share their thoughts.
While they will work for either... it's best to seperate the two functionally...
Ideally, we do not want to mess with our bio media often at all. As cleaning bio media will inevitably remove some of the bacteria living in/on it.
But we have to clean mechanical media, and the more often we do so the better. Leaving solid waste in the mechanical media to rot will unnecessarily increase the rate at which nitrates, phosphates, etc build up increasing the amount of water changes needed.
We often hear of people who need to do 50% weekly water changes while they brag abotu not needing to clean their filters more than twice a year. Cleaning those same filters every 2~4 weeks would allow those same people to cut their water changes in half... or keep the same water change routine and have much much cleaner water consistently.
