New Seagate Hybrid Drives Hampered By Slow Mechanical Guts 130
crookedvulture writes "Seagate announced its third-generation hybrid drives last month, revealing a full family of notebook and desktop drives that combine mechanical platters with solid-state storage. These so-called SSHDs are Seagate's first to be capable of caching write requests in addition to reads, and the mobile variants are already selling online. Unfortunately, a closer look at the Laptop Thin SSHD reveals some problems with Seagate's new design. While the integrated flash cache reduces OS and application load times by 30-45%, overall performance appears to be held back by its 5,400-RPM mechanical component. Seagate's last-gen Momentus XT hybrid spins its platters at 7,200-RPM, and it's faster than the new SSHD in a wide range of tests. The upcoming desktop SSHDs will also have 7,200-RPM spindle speeds, so they may prove more appealing than the mobile models."
Re:semi serious question (Score:5, Informative)
Why are we not seeing more 10K drives?
Only reason I can think of is direct competition with top-shelf scsi hardware. a 900G 10K SCSI [amazon.com] is about $500 bucks. I sure would be tempted to RAID twice as many 10K SATA for half that price if I could get the same RPM.
Re:semi serious question (Score:5, Informative)
Higher density at constant speed means higher signalling rates now vs before. We're already reading more off the disk per second at 7200 rpm than we were at 7200 rpm back when 200GB was big. Power requirements have taken a bigger position, and also at the higher densities tolerances need to be more exact and even more so at higher speeds. Going to lower spinning speeds allows you to get better results without tightening tolerances as much.
Re:Battery Life? (Score:5, Informative)
"How much extra juice does it take to spin those platters at 7200RPM? "
From my experience with their 1st-gen Momentus XT (500GB), about 15% reduction in overall battery life compare to my previous 5400 rpm drive.
Re:Laptop 7200rpm drives discontinued (Score:4, Informative)