Hybrid Hard Drives Just Need 8GB of NAND 373
judgecorp writes "Research from Seagate suggests that hybrid hard drives in general use are virtually as good as solid state drives if they have just 8GB of solid state memory. The research found that normal office computers, not running data-centric applications, access just 9.58GB of unique data per day. 8GB is enough to store most of that, and results in a drive which is far cheaper than an all-Flash device. Seagate is confident enough to ease off on efforts to get data off hard drives quickly, and rely on cacheing instead. It will cease production of 7200 RPM laptop drives at the end of 2013, and just make models running at 5400 RPM."
Hybrid drives on Linux? (Score:2, Interesting)
Are hybrid drives working well on Linux yet? Last I checked, support for hybrid SSDs was still in its infancy.
seagate research suggest seagate bargains are good (Score:4, Interesting)
seagate research suggest seagate bargains are good! how amazing!
hybrid drives blow, I guess better than nothing but no comparison to ssd. that 8 gigs isn't the same every day or if it is then the machine is acting pretty much just as a terminal and not moving media around etc(yes there was a time I could get by with a 3.2gbyte fireball, but that was long ago now).
excuse me as I go to do a simple drag'n'drop to my bigger hd drive. hybirds would be nice, IF they slapped 128gbytes+2tbytes on it and somehow it understood that there's no need to move the video file I'm viewing to the the ssd portion ever.
just playing two different games would outrun 8gbyte ssd portion... heck, max payne 3 was something like 30 gigs and one session of gaming probably accesses 8 gigs easily and it would be nice to have the os on the ssd portion..
Re:Of course! And you never need more than 640K RA (Score:4, Interesting)
No chance this is just the company saying this because they missed the boat on solid state drives?
Given that Seagate makes HDDs and has little or no Flash fabrication capacity, they were obviously going to include an HDD in the plan (and, given the price, so will a lot of buyers). They don't have an obvious bias (other than a general desire for 'less, because that keeps costs low') in terms of how much NAND cache is needed to see meaningful improvements.
I'd be inclined to distrust flimflam to the effect that 'Sure, hard drives are just as good as SSDs!'; but have no particular reason to doubt that 8GB, rather than 4, or 12, or 16, or 5, or 32, is the approximate amount of flash needed, if that is what they report.
Moving parts and fatigue (Score:5, Interesting)
But their 5400RPM hybrid drives suck (Score:4, Interesting)
When I was buying a new laptop hard drive I got a hybrid drive but not before some research. The 7200RPM Momentus XT mops the floor with their 5400rpm new generation of hybrid drive. The performance increase on their 5400rpm drives is insignificant, it was not even worth considering but I at least found stock of the Momentus XT which *IS* well worth considering and ordered TWO. I took into account cost, capacity and performance when choosing the drives. For the cost/performance the 5400rpm drives did not deliver but it had the capacity, the Momentus XT delivered on cost/performance and was only slightly lacking in capacity. Pure SSD drive only delivered on performance which in my case wasn't weighted enough in my process to justify. If the Momentus XT didn't exist I'd have just stuck with a 7200rpm drive.
So RIP Seagate's worth while mobile HDD's. Unless you've fixed the mediocre performance in your 5400rpm drives I'll either be doing full SSD or just buying somebody else's 7200rpm drive.
Re:Moving parts and fatigue (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Of course! And you never need more than 640K RA (Score:4, Interesting)
Yup, they missed the boat. Anyone who has used a SSD will go back to using a regular HD when they stop making SSDs, and the last available one breaks.
SSDs really are the bee's knees.
Well, qualified, they are are the knees of bees.
I have a Samsung which likes to give me read errors on boot up, after a try or two it gets its act together. Tried another one and the same effect. Samsung's tech support on this is nearly as good as staring at a wall of drying paint. (If anyone has a recommendation on the best, meaning most reliable 250GB or more SSD, please feel free to pass it along)
If you don't have most of your stuff stored via a library or other link on an NSA or server and SSD would be preferable, but if you're only needing to boot up an SSD is probably a bit more than you need, though the low capacity drives are approaching the price of low capacity mechanical memory. Soon I expect most new personal data devices (i.e. PC/Mac) will all by using SSDs.
Re:Of course! And you never need more than 640K RA (Score:5, Interesting)
I have the suspicion that Seagate is planning quite specifically; but just don't care all that much.
The majority of orders will, presumably, be from OEMs looking to stuff HDD slots on the cheap, while still complying with the Win8 hardware certification requirements [microsoft.com](most notably, resume in under 2 seconds) and possibly Intel's "ultrabook" requirements, which have their own I/O demands.
I suspect that Seagate's calculations of 'How cheaply can we build a drive that will satisfy the letter of the requirements that our customers need to meet?" were made with care, and aren't crap at all. They're just something of a lie if you expect that level of performance to be maintained under more stressful loads.
Re:Hybrid drives on Linux? (Score:5, Interesting)
I purchased one of those drives on the day it was available at Newegg for use in Linux, and then shortly after for a pair of them in RAID0 for a desktop (gaming) system where data integrity wasn't my main concern. In both systems I ran into firmware problems and could not natively flash them in the system that was running them. I pulled them into a bench PC I have and flashed them there and everything was fine. The issue had to do with power saving and would cause some pretty frequent hardware locking issues on both systems that was painful until I was able to resolve them. All 3 of the drives are benched now, but still work fine. I never lost any data due to the lockups - they would just hard lock the PC for a second or three and then continue working like nothing had happened.
In my experience this is typical early adopter fare.