Seagate Announces First SSD, 2TB HDD 229
Lucas123 writes "Seagate CEO Bill Watkins said today that the company plans to put out its first solid state disk drive next year as well as a 2TB version of its Barracuda hard disk drive. Watkins also alluded to Seagate's inevitable move from spinning disk to solid state drives, but emphasized it will be years away, saying the storage market is driven by cost-per-gigabyte and though SSDs provide benefits such as power savings, they won't be in laptops in the next few years. A 128GB SSD costs $460, or $3.58 per gigabyte, compared to $60 for a 160GB hard drive, according to Krishna Chander, an analyst at iSuppli. 'It will take three to four years for SSDs to come to parity with hard drives,' on price and reliability."
Me Too! (Score:5, Interesting)
It's so nice to see a company that fought this at every step pretend to embrace it.
I simply see market for a hybrid drive (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Every news source (Score:5, Interesting)
Truthfully, I'm really looking forward to hybrid drives with, say 64-128 GB of flash, where all the "load-often, change rarely" data goes, like applications, OS, etc., and 2^N (N >= 8) GB of classic HD storage space for stuff that may need gazillions of writes (browser cache, working documents, SVN repositories, etc.).
In fact, wouldn't it be great if the drive could be smart about it and--over time--identify files that were mostly read-only (iPhoto archives, MP3s) and migrate them to the flash storage area where fast, low-power reads would be a benefit.
While we're dreaming, database engines could even be optimized to read only from the SSD-portion of a hybrid drive if a particular data point had not been written to in over N minutes, or since the last collation (explained later), but would write to the platters, and then during quiet cycles, it could do a collation. The collation would move data which was on the platters, but which did not have a pattern of large volumes of writes back to the SSD volume.
And... I'd like a pony...
Analysts are dumb (Score:4, Interesting)
SAMSUNG Spinpoint F1 HD103UJ 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM. Cache: 32MB. Form Factor: 3.5". $184.99
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM. Cache: 32MB. Form Factor: 3.5". $209.99
Next year these will be 4TB, 8TB, 16TB? $100-$200 range. Call me on it; by December 2009 (i.e. in 2009, next year) it'll happen. Where will we see the SSD price point?
$460 for 128G SSD? Hell Yeah! (Score:5, Interesting)
We would disagree (Score:5, Interesting)
- SSDs aren't as vibration sensitive (both will not take a bullet, but only SSD can likely survive a normal drop of 2M on to concrete)
- SSDs don't have the temperature/altitude constraints
- SSDs don't have latency and no rise/shutdown time for green needs, in fact, they use hardly any power at all
- SSDs are generally faster, although there are algorithms needed in flash to prevent bucket overuse because reads are almost infinite, but writes are not
- SSDs take less in terms of precious metals and present fewer QA problems
- No electromechanicals to wear out.
The price point? Going down. It's an obvious solution to a long time problem. Magnetic versus flash storage will tend to favor flash, as magnetism decays sooner than flash will-- when flash is written to correctly.
Re:I simply see market for a hybrid drive (Score:4, Interesting)
Obviously you'd need to write some good software to get full use of it, but the same is true for an all in one with any intellligence (i.e logfiles are low-use but deserve to be on solid state since it means not spinning up the disk for idle activity)
It's not too different from the old scene setup of
New release comes out, it hits
No reason you couldn't do similar on a desktop with one "fast&small" and one "slow&large". It's all about being able to define what goes where, and preferably having software take care of that for you.
Re:Oh, no.. Here comes the nostalgia again.. (Score:5, Interesting)
An extra 2Mb of RAM came with that drive, for a system-wide total of 2.5Mb. Of course, with such a limited system, all I could do was run office and desktop publishing software, paint programs, 3-d modeling and ray-tracing software, and the latest games like Turrican, Lemmings, and the Indiana Jones adventure game.
It's amazing to see how far we've come these past 18 years.
Re:Every news source (Score:4, Interesting)
My HD has 186gb usable, and I'm using 172 of it. (eek...) I bet I only access at most 20 gb of that most of the time. Even making a say, 32gb or 64gb buffer would work great for how I use the computer - I'd be running entirely off the SSD part most of the time.
Most users could probably accommodate a dual drive anyway. One partition for the SSD and one for the HDD. Put your media and other things you don't need access to often but want to have on tap on the HDD.
Re:Me Too! (Score:3, Interesting)
SSDs will probably take over in the consumr market (Score:5, Interesting)
So what will happen is pretty obvious. Laptops are going to push SSD storage into the mainstream, giving it the critical mass needed to start the research bandwagon rolling, and 5-10 years after that happens hard drives will become the 'new' tape storage and most production systems will be using SSDs.
Even more pointedly, with power costs being the premium concern for data centers these days, and the hard drive being the only thing left in the computer that can't be engineered down to near 0 power consumption when idle (short of spinning it down, which has its own problems), my expectation is that large commercial concerns will see a huge cost benefit to using SSD storage despite the higher front-end cost of purchasing it.
-Matt
Re:Me Too! (Score:3, Interesting)
I wouldn't be surprised if they'd be shopping for a Flash supplier or at least a cooperation right now.
Re:Eee PC not a laptop ? (Score:4, Interesting)
manufacturers avoid the term laptop nowadays because of the fact that using them on your lap is strongly discouraged due to heat related issues (both the possibility of a hot laptop burning you and the fact that being on a soft uneven surface can interfere with ventilation on some models)
imo most laptops fit into one of a few categories
* craptops: built with price and headline specs (cpu mainly) as the main design consideration theese are popular with first time laptop buyers. They come to regret it when they run into the reliability and build quality issues. I don't see theese going solid state any time soon.
* ordinary decent laptops: (lattitudes, thinkpads macbooks) etc. Theese cost more than the craptops and that money mainly buys you better build quality. I see solid state being a build time option on theese in the near future but I don't see it being the default for cost reasons.
* desktop replacements, high performance and big screens but heavy and bulky,
* ultraportables: (smaller vaios, librettos, EEEPCs, OLPCs etc) many of theese are already using solid state drives.
strange. I'd very much consider.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:We would disagree (Score:3, Interesting)
While it's true, on average, they may use marginally less power, I think you'd be surprised at how much juice these SSDs can use up. Typical hard drives use most of their power spinning up the platter, and then momentum helps keep them going at a lower draw. SSDs also have a tendency to get rather warm, along with the CPU and RAM chips inside the machine. Overall, I still think SSDs are preferable, considering I'm currently filling out an RMA for my second dead HDD in a month.
Personally, for me I find the biggest selling feature for SSD to be the beautious lack of noise, the lack of seek whine or odd ticking you often get with HDDs. I'd happily pay a bit of premium just because of that! (MMmmmm - a dead silent Home Theater PC or perhaps an incredibly quiet replacement TiVo drive.)
Re:We would disagree (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Oh, no.. Here comes the nostalgia again.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Now you kids get off of my lawn!
Re:Every news source (Score:3, Interesting)
NAND has roughly the same read speeds, but it's write speeds (as a previous poster has also stated) are highly optimized for block writes in a very *very* linear manner. i.e. your digicam will sequentially write files, block by block, and it will write them fast. You will have only partilly filled blocks at the end of a file, but that's ok.
The moment you want to modify something that's already written things slow down quickly.
It's a bummer, but that's how it works. Where NAND would shine is a transaction server where it's writing a continuous (and possibly high speed) stream of data, that will be written once, but then read from multiple times, by different clients, with high contention rates.
-nB
Re:Analysts are dumb (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:SSD Performance (Score:3, Interesting)
Our pricing goals are to "follow the drives down", so as drives get cheaper we want our layer to follow them.
And we have talked with Samsung and others (and will continue those conversations). Then again, you know how "really big companies" work.