Seagate Unveils Its Third Generation SSHDs

[RedundantInk]

The company's new lineup of SSHDs aims to "deliver blazing-fast performance and high-capacity at an affordable price".

Seagate Unveils Its Third Generation SSHDs : Read more

 

[dimar]

I was hoping that since Seagate decreased the RPMs on the new drives, SSD size would increase. And what about the warranty??

 

[ram1009]

This whole concept is a waste of time and money, IMHO The extra speed of a SSD is only noticeable upon boot up or program launch. If you're a gamer, levels load a little faster. After a few days using one you don't notice the difference at all. The real benefit of a SSD is reliability. No moving parts. That speaks for itself. These "hybrid" drives are no more reliable than any other mechanical HDD and therefore are no use to anyone. Save your money and get a real SSD.

 

[aerofly]

Can these be RAIDed or would that mess up its cacheing? Wouldnt mind a few of the desktop versions in a RAID 5 configuration.

 

[CaedenV]

I think I feel the same about these as I do about Hybrid cars; They are needed to transition to the new tech, but in the transition you end up with an overly complicated product that, while better, is rarely better enough to justify the extra cost of the system. It is still much cheaper than a 1-2TB SSD, but most applications that need that kind of space will not benefit from 8GB of flash in the first place, and if you are just looking at an ultra fast boot drive and need a lot of storage then you are still better off getting a SSD+HDD rather than a SSHD.

The obvious exception to this (and the main market for this) is computers with only 1 drive space such as macs or laptops. But even in those cases you would still probably be better off with a SSD and external USB3 HDD.

 

[CrArC]

I can't see how 8GB of cache is anywhere near enough to be useful.

Perhaps 32GB would suffice. 64GB would be acceptable I think, enough to cache most regularly accessed data (OS, software, etc).

I honestly think it would be better to invest in one of those "SSD cache" drives designed to supplement normal HDDs than to bother with these SSHDs. Much more cache for your money.

 

[RealBeast]

I agree with CaedenV that these are a step in a long transition and in a few years you'll wonder why you bought this thing. The problem now is that a really useful amount of cache costs too much cash.

 

[usertests]

I'd like to see the square root of capacity or better in cache.

So 32 GB for 1 TB. 32-64 GB for 2 TB. 64 GB for 4 TB. 128 GB for 10-16 TB, etc.

 

[Pherule]

Hybrid drive? Yes please.
8GB? Yeah.. no. We'll try again next year. Or not. Time for full-blown SSD I think.

8GB is pathetic Seagate, and you're pathetic for even considering going so low.

 

[nordlead]

[citation][nom]ram1009[/nom]This whole concept is a waste of time and money, IMHO The extra speed of a SSD is only noticeable upon boot up or program launch. If you're a gamer, levels load a little faster. After a few days using one you don't notice the difference at all. The real benefit of a SSD is reliability. No moving parts. That speaks for itself. These "hybrid" drives are no more reliable than any other mechanical HDD and therefore are no use to anyone. Save your money and get a real SSD.[/citation]

I would agree if we are talking desktops since you can toss in a SSD and a HDD, but these are actually a decent solution for someone on a laptop that needs a lot of storage, but also wants fast boots (a college student would be a perfect example).

I wouldn't put one of these in a desktop though, since once the HDD portion dies, the SSD portion is wasted. Two separate drives and you can replace each part individually.

 

[nleksan]

Seagate is going to get demolished if WD comes to market with what they claim to be cooking up (500GB and 1TB Ultra-Slim 2.5" 7200RPM HDD's with 24GB SLC NAND Each)...

Considering how much of a premium Seagate charges for its SSHD's, we really should be seeing something more than this. 2TB with a pathetic 8GB NAND? Really? Chances are it'll cost at least double the current market price of the (admittedly very fast) 2TB Barracuda, while providing only minimal improvements as constrained by its small NAND Cache!
One thing I love about the Momentus XT drives, is that they are phenomenal in RAID arrays (RAID0, RAID6, RAID10) as the 8GB NAND "stacks" and eventually becomes PLENTY for the amount of spinny-space given. I just don't see that happening with 2TB of platter storage without an increase in NAND.

Been running 8x Momentus XT 750GB/8GB SSHD's in RAID0 off an Adaptec PCI-E3.0 24i-4e RAID Controller (4GB DDR3-1333 cache, CacheVault) for a year now, as my "fun"/"let's see how fast it'll go" RAID0 array.
Home Server case is a Lian Li D8000 double-wide, and thanks to the small form-factor of the Momentus XT drives, I simply added a pair of 4-in-3 Bay Adapters with 120mm fans blowing across the drives. Stuck in 8x 1x3.5-to-2x2.5 adapters to give them room to breathe (a few share space with some SSD's), and no problems!
Total Capacity: 6TB Mechanical + 64GB SLC NAND

Sequential READ: 637-661MB/sec
Sequential WRITE: 656-683MB/sec
BURST SPEEDS: >5GB/sec when the file is entirely cached!

Overall, it's not as fast as another 8-drive array I have, this one of 1TB VelociRaptors in RAID0, all short-stroked to 333GB/ea, with a 64GB Intel SLC NAND Cache Drive, but it's only lagging about 20% behind; however, the XT array simply cannot even come close to touching the VR's in Random R/W performance, with the VR array literally pushing 10-15x the IOPS.

I don't use any SAS drives (well, not any 15krpm ones) in my home servers, as I already saturate all my ethernet bandwidth (and that's with an Intel Hardware Dual-gigabit NIC + 2x onboard Intel NIC's per server; all desktops have at least 2 onboard Intel NIC's, 2 have PCI-E hardware NIC's).

At this point, if WD doesn't come through with REAL Hybrid Drives, I am just going to turn to RAID for PURE STORAGE, running RAID6+HS arrays in my 2 media servers, my file server, and my local shared server (leave my Games servers running RAID0). Instead, I'll just grab an OCZ R4 or equivalent PCI-E SSD, which takes up so much less space yet is an order of magnitude faster (at the minimum)!

 

[SinisterSalad]

These drives aren't meant for power users like a lot of us around here claim to be. If you have just an everyday user, these drives are great. For a while, I had the 1st gen 500/4GB drive in my rig before I went full SSD. The 4GB was enough cache for booting and loading my commonly used programs. It was only once I started playing BF3 and their larger maps when I noticed that the cache was no longer adequate. I'm sure the 8GB versions are large enough to accommodate most everyday user's needs. These drives are a perfect solution to those people. They get the speed of SSD for everyday use without having to shell out a ton for storage capacity. Sure, you can get a 64GB SSD for a boot drive, and conventional HDD for storage, but good luck getting those everyday folks to get use to remembering to not save everything on the default C: locations.

As a builder of systems to a lot of non-techy folks, I love these drives as a solution.

 

[dalethepcman]

Until a HDD manufacturer makes a something like a JBOD configuration with the SSD first and HDD second, allows the HDD to be parked most of the time, and increased the SSD portion to 64gb, I will stick to just SSD in laptops and dual drives in desktops.

 

[murzar]

8GB is low. But not very far off either for the purpose.

 

[alkhrt]

I can see a place for this technology in a laptop or other ultra portable device. I still think we're getting screwed by the industry on the costs. Most of the SSD vendors are also HD vendors. They've obviously got a lot invested in the HD side of the business. There's a lot that goes into a HD - enclosure, platter, head, motors to spin the platter and move the head, electronics to control that, cache and all of the other electronics. It looks like a no brainer to just stamp a bunch of FLASH and some companion electronics, solder it to a board and ship it.

 

[cjl]

[citation][nom]Pherule[/nom]Hybrid drive? Yes please.8GB? Yeah.. no. We'll try again next year. Or not. Time for full-blown SSD I think.8GB is pathetic Seagate, and you're pathetic for even considering going so low.[/citation]
Why not judge it based on performance, rather than based on how much flash you think they should have included? They don't need to cache an entire program - if most of the program can be loaded with a sequential read, you might as well service that operation from disk and just load the small random files from cache. These work very differently from a manual (or even a software-based) solution using a separate HDD and SSD.

 

[hannibal]

It is price vs performance matter. If 500 Gb HD with 8Gb SSD cache will cost 50$ and 500 Gb HD with 32 GB SSD cache will cost 150$ I think that the first one is more popular...
If there is not very big difference in the speed.

I was sure that In this year we would see hybrid drives with much larger ssd cache, but I seems to be wery wrong in that. The reason I can only gues, but I have two possible explanations. 8Gb is the sweet spot. It gives enough boost to system boot up time and does not cost too much. Or the price of hybrid would be too close to real SSD with much bigger SSD cache... I would like to know the truth in here...

 

[danwat1234]

If you aren't going to go beyond 8GB of NAND flash and not enable write caching, at least keep the 7200RPM speed so performance never gets too bad. I think most people will go for the 2nd gen drive; 750GB with 2 platters, 7200RPM, 8GB SLC

 

[bloc97]

I would like a lot to see bigger Hybrid drives coming out, like 1.5TB, 2TB or more, since the point of them is having the speed of SSD's while having great capacity like HDD's...

 

[s3anister]

[citation][nom]cjl[/nom]Why not judge it based on performance, rather than based on how much flash you think they should have included? They don't need to cache an entire program - if most of the program can be loaded with a sequential read, you might as well service that operation from disk and just load the small random files from cache. These work very differently from a manual (or even a software-based) solution using a separate HDD and SSD.[/citation]
You have a very valid point and while I agree with the fact that implementation is key to making a lesser amount of NAND perform well with the rotational media you can't argue against 8GB being too small. These drives would be able to cache a lot more of Windows/OSX/Linux in addition to the key files in many more programs if they came with NAND somewhere in the range of 24-32GB. With that much NAND vs. 8GB (a pen-drive amount of flash IMO) I can't help but feel that the hybrid drives would feel and perform like a real SSD except with storage for video/audio files and so on.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

I don't think I have ever seen a series of posts with this much anecdotal nonsense. The proof is in the testing and, having done extensive testing on same, I can tell you that without benchmarks, you can not tell the difference between a Momentus and a SSD w/ Hard Drive.

Last year, I used a THG Tier 1 SSD (128 GB Mushkin Chronos Deluxe) and one of the fastest HD's on the market (2 Gb Barracuda XT) and compared it with the 2nd Generation 750GB Momentus.

Having various users sit down and load AutoCAD 13, Adobe, Open Office, etc ...... none could tell the difference between two machines (Same CPU, MoBo, Memory) with the only difference being the storage subsystem. There were some slight differences in load times for the SSD / HD over the hybrid but you needed a stop watch to measure them. Here's some results:

Hybrid Booted windows in 17 seconds
SSD / HD Combo booted in 16 seconds

Hybrid loaded MMO in 45.5 seconds
SSD / HD loaded MMO in 45.5 seconds

 

[danwat1234]

5400RPM for your 3rd gen Hybrid drives don't make sense. It is opposite to your policy of desktop drives, where you no longer make 5400/5900RPM desktop drive but just 7200RPM drives. This was because you think 5400RPM drives waste time and don't save that much power and you are exactly right.
Why not make the same policy for laptop drives? Power consumption isn't an issue. I know hybrid drives are a bit different but they still benefit from fast mechanicals since it's only 8GB of flash and doesn't cache writes.

 

[dalethepcman]

[citation][nom]JackNaylorPE[/nom]I don't think I have ever seen a series of posts with this much anecdotal nonsense. The proof is in the testing and, having done extensive testing on same, I can tell you that without benchmarks, you can not tell the difference between a Momentus and a SSD w/ Hard Drive.Last year, I used a THG Tier 1 SSD (128 GB Mushkin Chronos Deluxe) and one of the fastest HD's on the market (2 Gb Barracuda XT) and compared it with the 2nd Generation 750GB Momentus.Having various users sit down and load AutoCAD 13, Adobe, Open Office, etc ...... none could tell the difference between two machines (Same CPU, MoBo, Memory) with the only difference being the storage subsystem. There were some slight differences in load times for the SSD / HD over the hybrid but you needed a stop watch to measure them. Here's some results:Hybrid Booted windows in 17 secondsSSD / HD Combo booted in 16 secondsHybrid loaded MMO in 45.5 secondsSSD / HD loaded MMO in 45.5 seconds[/citation]

Sounds like your system was CPU bound, do nothing but restart the pc and load an MMO, or you were using SATA1 then. My personal machine running a Corsair Force GT 512Gb boots to windows in 8 seconds, and loads Guildwars 2 in less than 10. Additionally if your a power user you will have more than 8GB of applications open on a regular basis, thus the SSD drive is not large enough to properly cache a large portion of what you may be working on and speed tanks to that of a traditional 56400 rpm drive.

Also consider that a 750GB momentus XT has a retail price of $200
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148940

The price of a 128GB MSATA SSD + 1TB 5400 RPM Toshiba drive is also $200
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226320
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822149376

Which would you prefer?

 

[pumilamac]

Has anyone seen the Desktop SSHD for sale?

dalethepcman, it currently looks like about a $20 difference ($159.99 vs $181.98). That $20 gets you more storage and better performance but assumes you have space and a connection for the mSATA card with a possible adapter. Basically you're one step away from what Apple calls their Fusion Drive. Will you recommend similar software for Win 7 x64?

 

[dalethepcman]

[citation][nom]pumilamac[/nom]Has anyone seen the Desktop SSHD for sale?dalethepcman, it currently looks like about a $20 difference ($159.99 vs $181.98). That $20 gets you more storage and better performance but assumes you have space and a connection for the mSATA card with a possible adapter. Basically you're one step away from what Apple calls their Fusion Drive. Will you recommend similar software for Win 7 x64?[/citation]Ahh the momentus XT is now %20 off. At $20 difference you can probably decrease the storage drive to 750gb to match the momentous and still have 128gb additional from the SSD.

If you are talking about caching software for Windows 7 X64, Intel SRT/RST is built into every modern Intel motherboard, but that wouldn't give you much better performance than a seagate momentus unless you were moving the same large files over an over again.