Seagate Says Future is Hybrid HDD, Not Pure SSD

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As far as value or price/performance is concerned I'd be tempted to get a 64GB Crucial 300 SSD for the OS (Windows) with apps and a few games. Then for storage a couple of 500GB Seagate Hybrid drives hooked up as a raid. But then I'm not even sure the hybrid would be an advantage in this situation since the hybrid stores small frequently accessed files on the flash memmory portion. This would make it suitable for an OS and not as a storage drive. And for an OS, only 64GB is required so why not go the SSD route?

So the only advantage I see for the hybrid drive is if your building a system and only need 1 drive. Then go the 500GB hybrid and it'll be half decent for OS plus storage. But for anythign seriouse like hardcore gamers I'd go the SSD and then get some 1TB+ drives in a mirrored raid for performance on the sotrage side.
 
Sorry meant to say striped raid. But you get the point. A RAID for storage using normal drives would be ust as fast as a hybrid raid. Hybrid only shows advantages when used for an OS. And when used for an OS why not jsut use an SSD? Hybrid works but it has no real world application unless your a non-gamer looking for a simple 500GB or less all-in-one high performance, low cost drive. Hybrid is good in this situation only.
 

A decent idea. Maybe put some dimm slots on a drive for buffering, and use some intelligence to pre-cache. A battery to prevent dataloss with write caching should cost under a buck. You could stick a 4GB buffer/cache on a drive this way for around $60. I'd think it could easily outperform SSD for most operations and there's really nothing that needs to be invented outside of some software to do the caching intelligently.

How about a 2TB drive with a 16GB buffer for around 350? I'd go for that. They could even add options to keep the cache powered via battery (or standby power) so you wouldn't have to precache after each boot. In theory it would be all the reliability and capacity of a HDD with better performance than SSD.
 
I imagine this needs to get more complex than it currently is before it's all that useful. Summary: make it like prefetching. Start by setting up HDD and SSD as "pairs" (no problem if they're sold in a single unit, but this should also be available for people who buy standalone HDDs and SSDs), then have the HDD copy its most used blocks to the SSD. It's like prefetching, except it doesn't need to reconstruct it from scratch each time the OS loads... only when the SSD in the pair is replaced.
 
SSD is an extremely old tech getting its roots back to the 1950's. In 1978 Texas Memory Systems made the first SSD which held 16 kilobytes. Price and capacity of the SSD's have always been behind the HD. Capacity hasn't really gained any more than the 1986 batram 20MB. Price has been the only major change in SSD technology. Currently a good 30GB SSD cost as much as a 1TB WD black edition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive

What is really surprising to me is that its took so long for hybrid HD's. Guess SSD price has keep hybrids in the dark for this long. The cost of making SSD's drop by 50% a year and capacity doubles. The cost of HD's drops about 10% a year but capacity increases about about 60%. I don't see a 256GB SSD costing $500 being an alternative to HD's. At the price drop tho SSD's should cut deep into HD markets in about 5 years.

I would buy a 256GB SSD if it was around $100. For me giving up 80% the capacity for the increased performance is were I draw the line.
 
He's an idiot if he thinks "hybrid" drives are going to become mainstream. I'd much rather have a 160GB or 250GB SSD drive for the OS, applications and some storage. Then, just add either a 2nd internal or external 2TB HDD for longer term storage and archiving. The main point of going to the SSD is performance. Using a hybrid means you will be losing most of that just to get a lower cost drive.
 
They are right about hybrid drives taking the spot of performance/capacity drive combinations on systems for the moment. It basically does what people are already doing, taking a SSD and pairing it with a HDD but it gives optimization overhead so that you don't need as large of a "SSD", hence dropping the price and giving about the same performance as the two pieces of hardware. This will probably end up being the norm at some point for budget to mid-range desktops, laptops, and probably budget netbooks especially with the push for "instant-on" PCs. That is until flash can meet a similar capacity verse cost ratio to magnetic storage, whenever that happens. High end systems would likely stick with the individual SSD since cost is less of a factor compared to performance goals relating to speed, power consumption, or both.
 
Yeah, Seagate's opinion isn't biased at ALL.....

The notion that we aren't going to go full SSD is bullshit. OCZ is ramping up their production by 100%. Cost per gb we won't be close to magnetic disks for a while to come, but in speed, we've completely blown magnetic drives out of the water.
 
I love ssd's but after a few refelxions, I came to conclusion that Hard Drives are better in term of getting your data back if they fail, they are burned/typed information on the disk that failed that can be retreived.

On a ssd, I don't think it is possible thus involving losing your data even thought the ssd life may last longer, you will lose the data for sure without any recuperation of data.

Althougth I do think SSD's are the way to go, I just seen a vertex 2 60gb for 120$ which is, IMO, ridiculous if you are looking to upgrade something, go for it now !
 
I just wish operating systems and apps were smarter in managing space between 2 drives. For instance, Steam doesn't let you choose where you can install games (some games I want installed on my fast SSD other games I don't). Yes I can install copies on each drive, but that's a bit annoying. Than many games don't let you pick where you stick save games (at least easily) and some of the game saves push 10 megs! It adds up if you have a smaller SSD.
 
[citation][nom]kelemvor4[/nom]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.[/citation]
i agree.

From a business standpoint however it is SSD v. scsi where the price won't be as lopsided.

My Company just recently bought a new San, loaded with SSD's but we also have scsi drives for storage. (100k)
 
@yellowblue, I agree about why Seagate is biased against SSDs, but unfortunately network storage is not acceptably fast for anything other than overnight backups and accessing small (sub-10MB) files. I've owned a so-called gigabit NAS from a respected maker and rarely saw transfer speeds over 25MB/s (roughly 3x the real-world throughput of 100Mbps ethernet). Just browsing the folders to locate files was sluggish, and trying to watch video from it was horrible. I certainly wouldn't ever think about using network storage to edit video. Wireless, which everyone seems so thrilled with, is significantly slower. I have a 300Mbps wireless N network and rarely see transfers over 6MB/s (slower than 100Mbps ethernet) so that's also out of the question.
 
[citation][nom]abswindows7[/nom]I love ssd's but after a few refelxions, I came to conclusion that Hard Drives are better in term of getting your data back if they fail, they are burned/typed information on the disk that failed that can be retreived.[/citation]

HDD recovery is rather expensive. Generally, if you care enough about the data to pay the thousands for having it recovered, you already had it backed up (and as we've said, backup HDDs are pretty cheap).

I think we will see hybrid drives more in the next few years, until NAND hits a price point on the order of 50 cents per gigabyte. Given current prices of $2-3/GB at 34nm, we'll need another shrink or two past 25nm to 1Xnm to hit that price.

For the power users though, SSD boot/application drive, HDDs for data and backup.
 
I dont see the drives themselves being "hybrid" as the future.. I have 2x30gb SSD drives in raid0 for my OS and few games.. All of my storage is on my 2x1TB or 2x2TB raid0 arrays.. While most systems wont have my setup, a single ssd drive with a single traditional drive for storage makes more sense to me than one hybrid drive.
 
7 or 8 years ago, I bought the original WD Raptor 10k 36gb. Years later, I now have 40 and 60gb SSDs. I have always used slower mechanical drives in my deskop for storage, and I don't miss the extra capacity in my laptop. So, I doubt hybrids in their current incarnations are the future. SSDs will continue to drop in price for capacity while HDDs will get bigger and faster too. It seems like the hybrid may just be a way to make HDDs better, not necessarily replace the SSD. So I take Seagate's position to be "we can make mechanical HDDs almost as good as today's SSDs in the future." This would be fine if SSDs stop advancing, but thats not going to happen.
 
I see the application for Hybrid SSD drives in single drive setups. ie. Laptops that need storage. But in a desktop set up there is no reason to use them. I don't want to have to replace my SSD just because the platter portion failed, like they often do. SSD life 10years Platter life 3years. If they can find some way to balance the Platter Life and get more time out of it then it might be a viable option, but not until then.
 
SSD's just aren't there yet. The performance is very irregular, and in real-world applications can be much less than a traditional hard drive. Many SSD drives claim 250 MB/s in sequential bandwidth. But what they don't tell you, is that they only achieve 25 MB/s or less in non-sequential writes. As long as companies like Western Digital keep making very very fast platter drives, like the 600 GB 10,000 rpm raptors, I see no need for SSD on the desktop.
 
[citation][nom]ares1214[/nom]HDD's cant get too much faster without spinning a lot faster.[/citation]
You couldn't be more wrong. Desktop HDD's have been at 7200 rpm for many years now, yet they keep getting faster and faster. This continual increase in performance has nothing to do with spin speed, but rather with platter density. If you double the density, you've now doubled the number of bits the head can read/write (i.e. the "performance") at the exact same spindle speed.
 
[citation][nom]Stardude82[/nom]I just wish operating systems and apps were smarter in managing space between 2 drives. For instance, Steam doesn't let you choose where you can install games (some games I want installed on my fast SSD other games I don't). Yes I can install copies on each drive, but that's a bit annoying. Than many games don't let you pick where you stick save games (at least easily) and some of the game saves push 10 megs! It adds up if you have a smaller SSD.[/citation]
You must be a Windows user. Linux and OSX allow you to choose location, and even move an installed app from one drive to another after the fact, without reconfiguring or reinstalling. It's very easy. For example, on OSX, I can simply drag and drop the Microsoft Word, or the World of Warcraft, or whatever application I want onto another drive, and launch it from there. It couldn't get any easier.
 
"I can tell you that my SSD drive takes about 25, 30 seconds to boot now versus the 12 seconds when I bought it. And that’s just an issue more related to OS than it is specifically to the technology but again with the hybrid there is things that you can do it alleviate that so your boot times are actually as compelling one and two, three and four years down the road."

This can not be true. How is a hybrid hard drive quicker in any way vs a well engineered SSD?
I know the Momentus XT looks at the user's behavior to see what files they want to have available in the 4GB flash memory... but that doesn't make it any faster than a true SSD.

The only thing I can think of is that he is talking about a situation in which the mechanical portion of the hard drive can be doing operations while the flash memory is also, giving increased throughput. But seriously, that statement in the interview is a lie. The Sandforce 2000 and newer stuff beyond that will pwn any hybrid hard drive when it comes to true performance.

Don't get me wrong, I plan on getting a Seagate's next hybrid drive in my mother's laptop. She doesn't user her computer very intensely and the 5400RPM drive in their is crap slow.
 
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