Seagate, Toshiba to Make SSD + HDD Hybrid?

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chodaboy

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I think i'd rather have a single drive(casing) with 1 ssd partition (boot, so it will need to be bigger then 4GB) and another partition that stores the data on a platter. This way i'll be able to fit this into my notebook's single slot.
 

joytech22

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Sounds interesting, would definitely be cheaper than a SSD while reading the most-used files faster.
Also make's a sizable HDD but the memory could be increased to at least 10-15gb to hold a good amount of startup applications and other frequently used app's.
 
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Is this not the sort of thing that was being talked about 5 years ago? And if I recall, Samsung actually produced in 2007?
And which was at one point going to be a requirement for installing Windows Vista on laptops, before Microsoft came to their senses and realized that would eliminate far too many customers?

Revolutionary and game changing indeed.
 

The Greater Good

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Sounds neat, but not impressive. I'd rather use a 60 gig SSD (or two in a RAID 0) as the boot drive and use a magnetic drive as the storage/backup option. Yeah, it will cost more... but the speed will be worth it! Well, worth it if you hate waiting for things to load.
 

zodiacfml

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for me, its good if the price premium over a standard HDD for the same disk space is around $20-$50. i don't game a lot and don't use professional apps so they can be installed on the hdd.
 
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An online store here in Finland already have it posted as a pre-order product, 148 Euros for the 500GB part, but then again, here the taxes are much higher.

The Specs.:

Kapasiteetti: 500 GB + 4 GB (SSD)
Pyörimisnopeus: 7200 rpm
Välimuisti: 32 MB (Cache)
Form factor: 2.5"
Korkeus: 9.5 mm (Height)
Liitäntä: SATA2 (3 Gb/s)
 

cmcghee358

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Seems to me it will lack the performance of SSDs, all the while being more expensive than it's HDD counterparts. Mediocrityx2. No thanks. Especially when you can get a 30-40GB SSD for 80-120 bucks. Nice try but they won't find a customer base for this until the SSD portion exceeds an OS install by 150% at least.
 

shin0bi272

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wouldnt this be along the lines of buying a usb flash drive and a standard hard drive (except for the speed diff on the ssd vs usb of course)? Here buy this 500gb hard drive and we'll throw in a 32gb usb flash drive. Then you could install windows to the flash drive and save everything else on your 500 gb drive. Why not just buy a 32gb ssd and keep your current hd? I mean seriously at this point who is buying their first computer? With current prices on 32gb ssd's in the 100 dollar range its not really that much of a stretch to think that people wont be getting an SSD as their boot drive soon.
 
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i think you all miss the point, you wont need to juggle which goes where, the drive will be intelligent enough to know which are the more often used files and pre-cache those to the NAND, you just plonk your files onto a single device and let it decide what to cache thats why it "dynamically learn about its user" so it can guess which files to pre-cache, this is more like an extension to the hard disk cache system, there was a time when hard drives had no cache now we can get up to 64meg, im guessing the cache now becomes 64 + 4 megs, the advantage of such a setup is that it would be dirt cheap to implement, probably barely more expensive then standard hard drives (based upon how cheap usb flash drives are) if they can deliver the performance i think this will become the norm, just like how cache became the norm on standard hard disk drives
 
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dman3k

ReadyBoost is limited by the speed of the USB port, segate can dump their cache directly into the sata port, but yes this is a glorified ReadyBoost, just without the need for windows 7 intervention
 

segio526

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I wonder how this performs in RAIDs (since it'll be dealing with stripes, not files per drive). Also, is the move-files-to-and-from-flash logic in the drive, on a special controller that needs to be installed, or in software that is loaded onto the PC?
 

sonofliberty08

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they should increase the capacity of the NAND flash to 12GB , and we can format it as the first partition to "C:\" where we install our system , and format the magnetic part to "D:\" for Programs , "E:\" for Storage , "F:\" for Pagefile .
 

Gopherboy6956

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Seagate actaully alread made one of these. I got one in my alienware laptop back in 2007, it was an 160gb standard hdd with 2mb of flash on it. It's not new at all.
 

blackbeastofaaaaagh

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How well it works will depend on a algorithm used.
Sounds like a good idea, though how well it works will depend on how well the algorithm is thought out. The system can analyze the systems data use history then only keep the often-accessed files on the SSD and the rest on the disk part.

However the OS could also perform the data swap functions (with some CPU overhead) for systems with separate SSD and disk storage units.
 

shushikiary

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To Jax, yes seagate did develope a hybrid drive and it worked VERY well, but dell, hp, etc said they didnt want to pay the extra money for the drive so it was scrapped (rather than selling it like WD does the raptor... why? idk).

Wait tell the press release and you see the cost, you wont be upset by the cost/performance ratio. It doesnt have 12 gb of flash for the cost would be much higher I'm willing to bet.

I'd tell you about the algorithm used to decide what is stored in the flash when, but then I'd have to kill you after. I will say its pretty ingenious.
 
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For those of you talking about how two drives would be better, this is clearly for laptops. We only get one drive and ssds just aren't big enough to store everything yet. If the algorithm is intelligent this should offer velociraptor performance and size for the same price but with lower power consumptions and noise. In a laptop package, a clear win.
 

gm0n3y

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@wagsbags,

Fair enough, for single drive only solutions (laptops) this could be a great compromise solution between SSDs and current HDs.
 

alextheblue

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[citation][nom]sonofliberty08[/nom]they should increase the capacity of the NAND flash to 12GB , and we can format it as the first partition to "C:\" where we install our system , and format the magnetic part to "D:\" for Programs , "E:\" for Storage , "F:\" for Pagefile .[/citation]
[citation][nom]chodaboy[/nom]I think i'd rather have a single drive(casing) with 1 ssd partition (boot, so it will need to be bigger then 4GB) and another partition that stores the data on a platter. This way i'll be able to fit this into my notebook's single slot.[/citation]
You're missing the point. Why manually juggle which files you need on the SSD, when you can let the algorithm do the work? With an intelligent caching algorithm, you can use less high speed NAND than you would normally need for a seperate boot drive (thus saving money). Yes, it's like readyboost, only faster, and without eating another of your laptop's USB ports.
 
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