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, Insightful)
Noise issues, power issues, and the likelihood that cheapening SSD will make magnetic disks obsolete. People who really care about speed just go solid state. With the price dropping I'm sure we all will in a few years.
Battery Life? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hey, Seagate: (Score:5, Insightful)
2000 called, they want their crappy hardware back.
Actually, this kind of thing has preceded every major storage advance in computers. As the replacement technology matures and becomes mainstream, the producers of the legacy technology cut corners on quality in order to maximize profit ahead of decommissioning of their production facilities for that technology. Zip disks, floppies, consumer tape drives, etc. All of these had major quality control issues near the end of their production runs. You would be hard-pressed to find a technology in this field that as it sunsets doesn't have its quality turn to absolute crap.
What Seagate is doing here is an attempt at prolonging that period to maximize profits on its existing (mechanical drive) production lines by gluing a turbo-charger onto the I/O equivalent of a four banger. They figure the consumers are idiots and will fall for four color marketing glossies saying these are the "fastest mechanical drives ever!" and boldly print the percentages all over the packaging... and then praying they don't look an aisle over and realize that a modest SSD would blow it out of the water for not much more cash. You can bet these drives are not built to the same specs or tolerances of previous models -- they will fail more often, and because of their hybrid nature, will be more difficult to recover data from when they do, if you can recover anything at all.
It's a douche move, but... it's sound business practice. Sell your customers down a river to keep profits up until you can turn up production on the Next Big Thing, and then try to buy them back later with discounts and deals.