Seagate Now Shipping 2nd-Gen Solid State Hybrid Drive

[exfileme]

Seagate has improved upon the original Momentus XT hybrid drive with double the NAND and a SATA 6 Gbps interface.

Seagate Now Shipping 2nd-Gen Solid State Hybrid Drive : Read more

 

[robisinho]

I thought hard drives at that capacity were going for way less.

Intel SSDs are a crappy comparison price wise. You could get those two seconds from less cost by pairing a 128GB SSD with a half tb $100 drive for maybe $50 more.

 

[de5_Roy]

$245 for a 750 gb drive with 8 gb flash cache... it's cheaper compared to a fullblown ssd but too costly for a hard disk drive of the same capacity. besides i heard a rumor that this drive was supposed to be priced much less then got bumped up because of thailand's flood.

 

[AndrewMD]

@de5_roy - The floods in Thailand has effect a number of manufactures including Toyota, Mitsubishi, Honda, Western Digital, Asus, and others that do much of their manufacturing.

 

[vilenjan]

WTB a desktop 3.5 variant that uses a sngle 1tb platter and 16gb SSD cache. AMD and older (pre z68) Intel users would love these drives

 

[jacobdrj]

Price is too darned high... SSD cache is too darned low...

Dang those floods... When will manufacturers learn to diversify their supply chains... Hire some freggin logtistics people, sheesh...

 

[danwat1234]

This new Momentus XT beats a 600GB Velociraptor! Pretty impressive and makes sense. It would be exciting if Atom netbooks started using these drives instead of slow 1-platter 5400RPM drives that they usually come with.
Good for desktops too.

 

[jacobdrj]

@dawnwat1234

I agree, but the price makes using these in netbooks prohibitive...

 

[kyuuketsuki]

[citation][nom]vilenjan[/nom]WTB a desktop 3.5 variant that uses a sngle 1tb platter and 16gb SSD cache. AMD and older (pre z68) Intel users would love these drives[/citation]
That would be whenever they roll out the Barracuda XT.

 

[jacobdrj]

[citation][nom]jacekring[/nom]I want to see this as a 500gig 10k rpm drive with 32gigs of cache. With both smart cache and "reserve" cache. So if I want, I can move specific files/apps to the cache regardless of what I use the most...This way you could move your OS to the cache permanently, and a few games or apps you use sparsely (or recently installed) but want to boot fast when you do and have the rest of the cache be smart and self allocate as needed.[/citation]
But how do you do that without breaking partition information? If someone can figure out how to make this an option, but keeping it idiotproof... you have quite a product on your hands...

 

[wiyosaya]

I can't say I would spend that much for this drive. If it had maybe 64GB SSD, I might. Personally, I think I would be much better off buying a 64 GB SSD and an 2TB SATA drive. I could easily do this for this price and end up with enough pocket change for a good game.

 

[bison88]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't a speed boost using traditional HDD systems be better if you had more RAM and could off-load temporary or most used applications/files to the RAM instead of on a NAND chip in the hard drive? Would give us a reason to finally upgrade RAM and push for more system memory which consequently would push the entire industry to make use of it. Not too keen on the whole SSD tech so maybe that sounds ignorant.

 

[digiex]

If the mechanical part (platter) dies, can I still use the SSD part?

Clark said that the new drive will write data on the hard drive platters first and then to the NAND so that data isn't lost if the NAND happens to fail. "If the NAND ever fails, you'll still have a perfectly good 7,200rpm hard drive," she said. "You'll still be able to boot up just like a regular hard drive, but you won't be able to take advantage of the NAND flash."

Ooops

I still can't comprehend that the mechanical part (platter) is more durable than the SSD part. (NAND).

I wonder if these new drives are cheaper than the non hybrid types since the skyrocketing of hard disk prices.

 

[GoldenI]

Instead of shipping out these overpriced pieces of hardware, why don't they focus their money on producing MORE regular HDDs in the wake of these floods? Oh, wait - I know why: because Seagate wasn't in the affected area. They're just using the floods as a marketing tactic. What a piss-off. I want my 2TB HDD for $89.99 please.

 

[tuffjuff]

[citation][nom]robisinho[/nom]I thought hard drives at that capacity were going for way less.Intel SSDs are a crappy comparison price wise. You could get those two seconds from less cost by pairing a 128GB SSD with a half tb $100 drive for maybe $50 more.[/citation]

The Momentus XT are hybrid drives. They offer the storage (and overall speed) of a traditional hard drive but combine it with a 4GB (on the original) SSD cache which speeds up overall day to day operation. They make a pretty big difference, although I agree the price on this one is a bit high. When I picked up my 500GB original XT it was I think $100 or $105.

That said, hard drives seem to have jumped in price lately. I had to wait for a cyber monday "deal" to get a 500GB hard drive for $70. I could've swore a year ago you could get a 1.5 TB hard drive for not much more...

 

[orbitron]

So the 500GB (ST95005620AS) version is only 3Gb/s? I went to seagate.com it says 6Gb/s but when I visited Amazon.com it shows 3Gb/s only.

 

[billybobser]

other than space, what saving is there from buying a dirt cheap 16gb ssd and a 1tb 7200 disk?

Also!

What does this make so much difference when having 16gb (for example) of ram makes hardly any? Since ram is not really a bottleneck, and normal users are making hardly any use of the extra ram. Are chipset / ram manufactures being lazy and not trying to utilize this wasted space?

 

[RaptorHunter]

or I could buy a 120 GB for less money and have all the space I need without compromising performance with a hybrid drive.

Hybrid drives would have made sense a year ago when SSD space cost more and the flooding in thailand hadn't caused a price spike in spinning drives. Now there's no reason not to just get a ssd that's big enough to hold your OS and all your apps and then add on a spinner if you need the extra space.

 

[mcvf]

It is 512 B not kB.

 

[anti-painkilla]

[citation][nom]bison88[/nom]Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't a speed boost using traditional HDD systems be better if you had more RAM and could off-load temporary or most used applications/files to the RAM instead of on a NAND chip in the hard drive? Would give us a reason to finally upgrade RAM and push for more system memory which consequently would push the entire industry to make use of it. Not too keen on the whole SSD tech so maybe that sounds ignorant.[/citation]


Again correct me if i am wrong, but RAM tries to be as efficient as possible, keeping as minimal as possible on it, only what is needed. It relies too much on the HDD/SSD for more ram to be useful. The bottleneck is happening on the HDD. Also booting up/ loading programs would take the same time, just in the application responses would be faster.

 

[dthx]

I see many people missing the point here. A cheap ssd for the os and a spinner for the data is not a solution that works in laptops. This drive will never be as fast as putting your system on a ssd, but in a laptop, it realy makes a big differrence compared to a standard drive (even on the previous model that only has 4Gb cache). The price tag is too high on this drive though.

 

[andy_newton]

The past 10 years, I have yet to encounter a Seagate hard drive that I retire. All died in the job.

 

[alidan]

i recently had problems with my hdd, for some reason i dont know, it was running at 2mbps without being in pio mode, that is the main reason why im going for for an ssd for a christmass pressent, got an intel 320 120gb drive for 1$ a gb.

i have to say, why would anyone want to have an ssd and a hdd combined if you have the space for an ssd and a hdd? i can understand this in a notebook computer where you may not have space for 2 drives, but at the same time, if you are willing to put almost 300$ in it for a drive, can i also assume that the laptop has space for 2 possibly?

i mean i always knew that ssd was faster for boot, but didn't care until i realized that something was going after my hdd and bringing everything to a crawl and it wouldn't happen on an ssd, wouldn't attaching a limited ssd to a hdd defeat this quality of them?

 

[dalethepcman]

[citation][nom]jacobdrj[/nom]But how do you do that without breaking partition information? If someone can figure out how to make this an option, but keeping it idiotproof... you have quite a product on your hands...[/citation]

The same way that Seagate has done it, concatenate both an ssd and hdd into a single package use adaptive memory algorithms. These would be much cheaper if Seagate wasn't trying to capitalize on the floods in Thailand.

 

[tanjo]

[citation][nom]Andy_Newton[/nom]The past 10 years, I have yet to encounter a Seagate hard drive that I retire. All died in the job.[/citation]
That's too bad. I still have my working 4 year old SG 250GB with 31k power on hours and 0 reallocated sectors. Though all 3 of my WD died within 2 years.

And like mcvf said: 512 bytes not 512 Kb. With my Win7 folder having 51k+ files eat would eat at least 30GB.