Seagate's New SSHD Hybrids Have Dual-Mode Flash Caches 141
crookedvulture writes "Seagate's has revealed its next-generation hybrid drives, and for the first time, there's a 3.5" desktop model in the mix. The new family of so-called SSHDs includes standard and slim notebook variants with 500GB and 1TB capacities, plus 1TB and 2TB desktop versions. All of them combine mechanical platters with 8GB of NAND in a dual-mode SLC/MLC configuration. The SLC component is largely reserved to cache host writes, while the MLC portion is filled with frequently accessed data to speed read performance. Despite MLC NAND's lower write endurance, Seagate claims the SSHDs have more than enough headroom to last at least five years with typical client workloads. More impressively, the mobile SSHDs are supposed to be faster than the old Momentus XT hybrid even though they have slower 5,400-RPM spindle speeds. The mobile models are slated to start selling shortly at $79 for 500GB and $99 for 1TB, while the 1TB and 2TB desktop flavors are due in late April for $99 and $149, respectively. Unlike other NAND caching solutions, Seagate's tech requires no software or drivers, making it compatible with any OS."
Re:What is the point? (Score:4, Informative)
Its unlikely that many of your games will end up on the cache seeing as its only 8 GB.
You don't know how this works. The firmware recognizes individual HD sectors that are frequently read, and transparently copies them to the SSD.
Re:8 GB of flash in the disk vs 8GB of RAM on boar (Score:4, Informative)
Giant thumbs up (Score:5, Informative)
I have the first gen XT and I can say is that these things are everything they're cracked up to be. If you're not buying an SSD then you should be getting one of these. Generally if you strip away the SSD portion you're still left with one of the best mechanical drives on the market, but the SSD portion really and truly does make a solid and positive difference in everyday computing life.
Re:What is the point? (Score:2, Informative)
"Face it, we're all a bit of a control freak when it comes to anything PC."
No, just many pretend to be. Those that do don't even know how storage works.
"It also leaves the option open to allow tweaking as to the algorithm or ruleset used to determine where data is stored."
Which will be done exactly never.
The Apple solution is limited to internal storage only as well as to their best attempt to keep it closed to their own hardware. It has the advantage of expanding capacity where block-oriented solutions do not plus the division of work is in a superior location. You cannot dual-boot the Apple solution. It is better only in applications that Apple envisions, precisely the opposite of what you suggest.
Re:What is the point? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually it's not. You can create a hybrid volume from any two drives easily via terminal. You can find the instructions to do so with a few seconds of Googling.
The restriction on dual boot is not related to the hybrid, but rather due to the EFI and limitations in Windows.
Windows can’t boot from drives larger than 2TB in the absence of an EFI or UEFI BIOS.
Re:What is the point? (Score:5, Informative)
Given that the most read sectors probably contain parts of your OS and pagefile, and considering the size of a modern OS
If you're reading/writing to the pagefile more than just a very little, you're running the performance equivalent of a 200MHz Pentium 686. Not kidding. People seem to think swap is a thing that happens a lot; it isn't. You know how you have 16GB of RAM and you're like 1.2GB into swap somehow? That's 1.2GB of program initialization crap and other cruft that NEVER GETS TOUCHED and was paged out.
You know how you're only using 6GB of RAM, but somehow you have 1.2GB in swap? 10GB of that shit is pagecache so your OS doesn't have to re-read operating system files (among other shit) constantly. That stuff gets read at boot time.
Computers don't work by churning the hard disk a lot.
Re:Too similiar to SSD (Score:5, Informative)
>Granted they're faster than most peoples 5400rpm drive running in their laptops,
Not just faster, way faster. I've upgraded a number of clients computers from the crap HP comes with by default to XTs with the 8GB cache. Unless they have a very large working set of data they commonly use, the user will not notice a significant difference between the SSHD and an SSD.
If you tell most consumers do you want a 500GB SSD for around $500 or a 500GB SSHD for $79 where the $79 drive makes most, but not all things faster, most people will go with the second option, and most people will have made the right choice going with the second option.