Seagate Says Future is Hybrid HDD, Not Pure SSD

[Marcus Yam]

Seagate's placing bets that people still want big, capacious HDDs, not just pure SSD speed.

Seagate Says Future is Hybrid HDD, Not Pure SSD : Read more

 

[Darkerson]

If thats what they think, then they need to step it up some. So far all we have from them is a hybrid drive with a paltry 4GB of flash. That and its in a 2.5" form factor. How about making some 3.5" drives with an actual decent amount of flash inside.

 

[yellowblue]

Of course they are biased since they are not a SSD company. As network bandwidth grows, hardisk will be on NAS / home servers while SSD will drive the gadgets / laptops and PCs.

 

[executor2]

If Intel lunches the new 600GB SSD as in the leaked charts posted in TH , I bet the future is SSD . By the way I own a 250 GB Western Digital and I am very happy about that " limited " space

 

[proxy711]

I'm not sure i agree in time prices will fall and SSDs wont cost an arm and a leg.

I think any huge computer geek will have a SSD for their OS and a hybrid or normal HDD for backup and random files. I don't think anyone thought HDDs were going to be phased out anytime soon.

The normal consumer would be just fine with a 250-500gb SSD. I know my parents could get by with just a 60gb.

I own seagate's hybrid drive, i have it in my envy 14 while its a good HDD I'm not blown away by its performance like i would be if i had a good SSD.

 

[aevm]

"as Seagate introduced hybrid drive last quarter, you get basically the features and function of SSD at more like disc drive cost and capacity."

No, you don't. Not so far anyway. Maybe with a lot more Flash and with faster HDDs. Maybe in some scenarios involving random accesses to a small number of small files, so the cache actually helps.

According to the benchmarks here,
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/seagate-momentus-xt-hybrid-hard-drive-ssd,2638-6.html
Seagate's Momentus XT hybrid shows 84 or 85 MB/s average sequential read/write speeds. That's comparable to WD's 1.5TB Green hard drives, IIRC. Recent WD Black hard drives can reach over 100MB/s, for example. A Velociraptor can reach 130MB/s. Some Crucial SSDs offer 200MB/s for writing and 250MB for reading.

 

[SneakySnake]

Plus SSD drives are relatively brand new compared to standard HDD's. In a year or 2 we'll have 500 GB+ SSD's for a few hundred $$

 

[cryptz]

his comments seem shockingly short sighted for a big player. To say that ssds are bad because there isnt alot of storage is pretty narrow minded, especially when making a statement about the future. cost is comming down and capacity is going up, give it another year (if you have to)

 

[werxen]

Anymore else think its bullcrap the CEO of a harddrive company says he has to clean his hdd for more space? Just saying...

 

[TeKEffect]

Sounds like Nokia down playing android.... wake up!

 

[wolfram23]

I'd like to see a review of hybrid HDDs

 

[Marco925]

Is every CEO of a tech company named Steve nowadays?

 

[masterasia]

Seagate is crazy. They're only saying it because their hard drives suck.

 

[MxM]

He is right for the next, ehmm, 2-3 years. But even in 5 years or sooner, I think most of the drives will be SSD for home computers. Of course, HDD will have use in servers were massive storage is required, but not at home.

 

[killerclick]

I have Windows 7, Adobe CS4, 10 Steam games and all my work on less than 100GB... so a 160GB SSD would be quite enough for me. My HDD is the loudest component in my system by far and losing that constant whine of 7200RPM would totally be worth the money.

 

[exodite]

I, too, see going for a 'pure' SSD for the OS and applications and a big-ass conventional HDD for storage as the future.

I really don't need a hybrid drive.

 

[HenrikG]

I have the Intel 160GB SSD and I couldn't be happier. I'll never go back to HDD except for maybe an external HDD for backing stuff up.

I was thinking about upgrading the HDD in my PS3 to the Seagate 500GB w/ SSD but we'll see. I'm not going to do it until GT5 comes out and well, we all know when that will be right...

 

[The_Trutherizer]

I don't agree with him. The future will be solid state. It may not be the current technology employed for solid state manufacturing, but you can be sure as hell that the future of storage is solid state. He should say near future. Short-sighted proclamations like this will only get you quoted in hundreds of short-sighted-dumbasses-who-should-have-known-better-lol-tech articles 20 years from now.

 

[atomyc]

ssd is still in its infancy so low gb and high price is normal. just wait a few years and 500 gb ssd will be the norm.

 

[godwhomismike]

I installed an OCZ Agility 2 in a Lenovo laptop (2.2 GHz C2D, 4GB DDR3, and 512MB Nvidia GPU). The machine turned into a blazing speed demon. Once you use an SSD, you never want to use a traditional hard drive again. Oh, and the Apple SSD drive are not exactly running optimized. OSX has no Trim support, so you are giving up performance you'd normally see on a Windows 7 based machine. See Anandtech's performance comparison: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3991/apples-2010-macbook-air-11-13inch-reviewed/4

All I have to say is, the SSD drives are worth their weight in gold. And from what I am starting to see, The SATA 6Gbps versions of the next generation of SSD drives are said to be getting around 500 MBps performance.

 

[Scotteq]

I could buy Mr Lukzo's statements in the context of a transition. I have an SSD (128GB), and use it for my OS and Games. But it is still cost~prohibitive to use an SSD for storage, and so I also have a 1TB WD Black for music, video, and other records. Both for cost's sake and also for convenience sake: if/when I build a new rig, I can simply move the storage drive.

Unfortunately for Seagate, they have yet to deliver a product that provides the speed of an SSD with the capacity of spinning discs. I'd buy one if they did. But they don't. So I don't.

 

[figgus]

The hybrid drives would be more useful if they combined a useful SSD size and a large HDD size as TWO drives in one form factor. Then you could choose what data went where (OS and apps to the SSD portion, MP3 and images to the HDD portion) and still fit the unit into areas with not much space like laptops, netbooks, and SFF PCs.

Being at the mercy of the drive's software knowing what data is important and what data isn't just seems like asking for trouble.

 

[g00fysmiley]

so instead of competing in ssd they throw a big buffer on a hdd and say look at our product its better because my personal experience (which isn't biased at all) shows hybrid drives to be faster ... nevermind the benchmarks showign how much faster an ssd drive really is... i say our is faster so believe me !

 

[jhatfie]

I have not moved to SSD because of the price/capacity as has been mentioned although the performance is certainly desired. My 1TB Samsung F3 is about half filled with games. Pictures, Music and videos I place on my Windows Home Server so they do not take up space. I would for sure need at least 500GB, 1TB being a safer bet for future needs. So until the 500GB SSD's are $200 or less, I cannot justify the cost. $2400 for 2x500GB SSD versus $65 for a 1TB HDD......I can wait the extra few seconds for my game to load. I do agree that eventually that SSD's will be the future, although if Seagate could make a Hybrid drive that split the performance difference while was 50% more expensive than a traditional HDD, I would be all over it.

 

[kelemvor4]

I do think solid state is the future, but at present it's not for me.

24 256Gb SSD's $16,800 to replace my existing 6Tb $400 array. A long road ahead for SSD's to replace HDD's just from a cost perspective; then there's the continuing problems with write reliability.