Seagate Says Future is Hybrid HDD, Not Pure SSD

Page 4 - Seeking answers? Join the Tom's Hardware community: where nearly two million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Status
Not open for further replies.
I bought the 128 gig Corsair performance series 2nd gen SSD with the Samsung controller. TRIM is enabled on Win 7 6bit and it runs flawless. Couldn't be happier and it didn't cost me a leg to buy it. Haven't had any studder issues, no loss of speed and most of all, its stable.

I use my raptors as backup and storage/scratch disk now. There is just no comparing a spin drive verses an SSD.

If the 2nd gen of SSDs are this good, give them 2-3 more years. Price verses gigabyte will come down, speed will improve and poor reliability will most likely be a thing of the past. Although, the reliability issue seems to dependent on the controller rather than the flash memory itself.
 
[citation][nom]stm1185[/nom]Seagate is stupid. Cloud for all non sensitive personal data. SSD for sensitive personal data, OS, local hardware necessary programs.[/citation]

What about HD movies? That would probably need to be stored locally..
By HD, I mean true HD.
 
I think we'll be seeing traditional HDD drives for quite a number of years to come because of the price/capacity ratio compared to SSD drives.
But I could imagine HDD drives with bigger cache capacities than today, e.g. 128 Mb cache instead of the 32 Mb which is standard today.
I wonder if a traditional HDD with a big cache could be called a hybrid drive ?
 
There is still the high price of SSD which kind of ruins the idea.. unless the price can be reasonable (under $300) hybrid will be a niche market. No longer will consumers pay $400+ for mass storage. 128-512gb For the O/S and Applications will become an attractive proposition in the next 4-5 years. The O/S will be able to shave several seconds off boot times.
 
How about a hard drive with integrated SSD. They will be both partitioned under the same drive letter in the OS. The OS will be configured the way that it will be installed on the SSD part of the drive. When users create folders, there will be a choice if it's created on the SSD or HDD part of the drive. The user can also have a choice to switch folders or files between SSD and HDD (all on the same driver letter). It would be nice if you could remove or upgrade the SSD part on the drive, the way of SODIMM maybe... Got plenty more ideas..... :bounce:
 
[citation][nom]tmc[/nom]There is still the high price of SSD which kind of ruins the idea.. unless the price can be reasonable (under $300) hybrid will be a niche market. No longer will consumers pay $400+ for mass storage. [/citation]
Maybe YOU won't, ya cheap bastard. I'd gladly pay $1000 or more for a very fast, reliable, and very large SSD. Unfortunately, there isn't one on the market that hits all three points.
 
I think SSD's seem like more of "the future" than a hybrid drive.

SSD's will grow in capacity, and become more affordable with time. It's just a matter of how long, and I really have no idea. But I do know hard drives 10 years ago were about $100 for an 80GB. Now they're $100 for 2000GB =)

Talk about fast growth, haha
 
Cranial rectal insertion on part of this CEO. The hybrid drives do not offer enough flash to make them a meaningful purchase as the user is unable to determin is to how the flash would be used and the same for the os. 4GB are you joking right? Bid enough for Win 3.1 but not OSX or Vista (I don't like Win7). For laptops people are going to be wanting SSD any way to save on weight, reduce heat, and noise ontop of having longer battery life without having to lug around the brick to keep the thing going. I can't stand how hot 2.5inch drives get in laptops.
 
They are lying. Solid state storage is definitely the future. Even if it might not totally be ready for the prime time, we will definitely not be using mechanical hard drives in 10 years.
 
Hybrid drives would only be a stop gap really. SSD capacity is increasing at a faster pace than platter based drives - it is an inevitability that they will take over as capacities increase and costs decrease. If Seagate is serious about hybrid drives (which could definitely carve out a big market share over the next few years) then they need to release a 2.5" drive with say a 64GB flash portion and a 320-500gb platter based portion. That kind of thing would easily be doable for under $200 and would be perfect for laptops where multiple drives isn't (usually) an option. Importantly though, such a hybrid drive needs to have an option where it can be partitioned to have a pure SSD partition and a pure platter partition (I seem to recall that hybrid drives so far have tried to do everything magically) so that users can set up their os and apps on the SSD portion and save all their data to the other part.
 
I could see a hybrid drive being useful.. in the short-medium term anyhow.
Something like 250gb of Solid State and 4TB on the platter,s or something. That would be neat.
 
Interesting. For me it's that mechanical hard drives keep failing and I lose all my data. I'm only buying SSD from now on. The speed is fantastic, but that's not why I switched.
 
[citation][nom]suncho[/nom]Interesting. For me it's that mechanical hard drives keep failing and I lose all my data. I'm only buying SSD from now on. The speed is fantastic, but that's not why I switched.[/citation]

Be careful with SSDs, they can also fail and when they do your data is gone with little hope of recovery - at least with a platter based drive there are both professional and home recovery tools available. I had a three week old SSD drive fail and lost my OS install - luckily I keep all data on a different drive and then have it all backed up to another drive too.
 
Being in the industry for long, we all know Nand is a lousy media and won't be the future storage. Trust me.
 
I use a 64G SSD and Windows 7 64. I immediately changed the registry and moved the Users directory onto another drive, so I effectively get most of the SSD hybrid advantage with a small SSD for the OS and programs.
 
I've used both a hybrid (currently, Seagate) and pure SSD (Intel) in my current laptop (which I think is the primary target for hybrid drives as you do not usually have the luxury of adding a second drive). I'm underwhelmed by the hybrid. Its better than a normal HDD, but it certainly isn't anywhere near the performance boost as an SSD (even for something it should excel at like booting and logging in to Windows). Either there is more algorithm work to be done (i.e. selection of what goes into the flash memory), or it simply isn't going to work even in the short-term. While the hybrid drive was an iteresting idea, I'd rather lose the storage space than deal with the performance differential (this is a corporate laptop so the security overhead eats into performance quite a bit, especially the software encryption).
 
When flash memory becomes more reliable, I will consider SSD. Until then, HDD solutions are much better. I have a 70% failure rate in devices with flash (failure to the point of unusability, not just one corrupted file). I cannot afford to lose my important data to the whims of generally substandard hardware.
 
[citation][nom]dark_lord69[/nom]The problem with mechanical disks is that they suffer from breakdowns and other problems quite frequently. I deal with this EVERYDAY, since I am a computer technician for a large corporation.[citation]

I am not a computer technician and so do not deal with this every day. I can, however, speak from personal experience. As a computer user for well over 20 years, I have never had a single hard drive break down on me, and I have used some for several years. However, I have had seven flash drives (USB) corrupt to the point of complete unreadability, most within one year of service. I call it as I see it. Flash drives are inferior at this stage to hard drives.
 
SSD for OS/Games and multi-terabyte drives for non crucial data IE music/movies Will probably be this way for another 3-5 years or until SSD can go into the terabyte realm with a decent price/performance ratio.. I don't need my movies to load 1/10th of a second faster but I do need my games to 🙂
 
Tells me to sell my stock in Seagate, Standard HD's are a bottleneck, SSDs are fast so when they get to 1tb or more Western digital, Seagate and the likes will have the best buggy whips available. Say goodbye unless they can show they're faster than the SSD's.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom