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."
Of course! And you never need more than 640K RAM! (Score:5, Insightful)
No chance this is just the company saying this because they missed the boat on solid state drives?
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No chance this is just the company saying this because they missed the boat on solid state drives?
Or because 5400 rpm drives are much cheaper to produce, not requiring nearly as stringent tolerance levels as 7200/10k/15k rpm drives?
What's certain is that the worst case times will increase, and that's when people get irritated. It's easier to live with slower overall than it is to live with faster overall, but much slower at times. That will stand out like a sore thumb, and be a source of irritation.
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As long as the most regularly libraries and executables are cached, it shouldn't seem slow.. for other files, you only need to wait when they're opened initially. I don't even really notice when I open documents over a wi-fi link, so I don't see why opening documents from a 5,400RPM HDD should be much worse.
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You're assuming that "opening documents" is the bottleneck where people can get irritated. It isn't. It's more likely to be when you need to do some large operations. For a home user, that might be scanning an MP3 collection or several thousand photos. Or copying something big from a thumbdrive.
For an office user, that might be when IT runs an AV or compliance scan, or your VM saves a snapshot, or you archive Outlook.
In either case, it's the worst case times that irritate users. Not the normal opening
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You're assuming that most people do that anymore. I'm the only one in my circle of friends who still maintains an mp3 collection (which is on a file server anyway). Everyone else either stores the files on their phone/mp3 player or, more commonly, streams the media. Likewise with photos, most people store them online now. Besides, how often do you actually look at those photos? We're talking everyday usage, not Aunt-Bertha-Is-In-Town-For-Her-Yearly-Visit usage. Likewise for an office user, any competent IT
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For things where you're going to have to wait a few minutes anyway, an extra few minutes isn't really an issue as you'd already be going to get a coffee or check Slashdot or whatever. If it's on the order of seconds, then waiting a few extra seconds isn't a big deal either. Well, that's my preference anyway, maybe yours is different..
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My laptop is now 7 years old. In that time, I've made three major upgrades to it.
1) Moving from XP Pro to Win 7 Ultimate
2) Upgrading from a 5400rpm to a 7200rpm drive (only other major difference between drives was capacity)
3) Upgrading from 1GB RAM to 2.5GB RAM
As far as day-to-day performance goes, the hard drive upgrade made the most noticeable difference. The RAM upgrade is great for the relatively rare moments that I have a lot of stuff open on my laptop (it's not my primary computer) and Windows 7 cert
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You weren't dealing with 500GB platters in the 7 year old 5400RPM drive. Not quite apples to apples. But Seagate going with an SSD portion that's barely bigger than today's RAM upgrades seems silly.
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For static pages, yes, that's basically true. The difference here is that the vast majority of files on your PC are static with relatively few files changing regularly. Web pages usually have a fair bit of dynamic content that changes every time you view the page (not to mention streaming media). Obviously it's not true of everyone, but we're talking about *most* people; *most* people rely on streaming/web for a good majority of what used to require large files.
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Not really, you're talking about the difference between a couple seconds and 10-15 minutes.
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Not really, you're talking about the difference between a couple seconds and 10-15 minutes.
10-15 minutes?!
Back in your day to load each webpage, did they deliver each bit by abacus via horseback? :P
Re:Of course! And you never need more than 640K RA (Score:5, Funny)
"Back in your day to load each webpage, did they deliver each bit by abacus via horseback?"
Isn't that how YouTube does it since Google bought them?
Re:Of course! And you never need more than 640K RA (Score:5, Funny)
So if I stick with 5400 RPM hard drives, I get doughnuts?
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What's also certain is that with hybrid drives you get the slow read speed of a 5400 rpm, the mechanical disadvantage of a fragile rotating platter, and the catastrophic (read: total) data loss when SSD's fail.
No thanks. The money savings vs. buying a true SSD is not worth the extra complexity, slower read times, and potential for failure. If I am going to accept the risk of a SSD failure, it better be fast - through and through!
I can't wait until flash memory becomes so inexpensive that it becomes standa
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Having RAID on the drive itself mostly defeats the purpose of RAID (excepting RAID 0, but even that has issues with this approach). RAID is best for combating downtime due to hardware failure. By sticking both "disks" of a RAID-1 on one drive, you have no recourse if one of those "disks" fails. You can't swap out half a drive to let it rebuild on a good 'disk'.
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Or that Windows just set the drive into PIO mode because of one too many UDMA errors. Even when the disk itself is perfectly fine.
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Time to move on from XP. You should really give Windows 7 a try.
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.
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Their approximation is taken from a dark place...located below the belt line.
In other words, that number is crap. It's shows a divine lack of future planning for capacity...and a stoic belief that, contrary to all historical evidence, applications and operating systems will not continue to grow in size. Assuming a ROI of at least 3 years, perhaps 5 years for some machines...you're looking at at least one major OS upgrade, possibly two, which tend be larger with each iteration; additionally, individual appli
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.
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The part I find interesting is that Intel-SRT (basically using a separate SSD as a cache) won't work with less than a 20GB SSD. When developing SRT, Intel determined that 20-60GB is the appropriate range for caching, so it won't work with 20GB and will ignore capacity beyond 60GB.
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They aren't claiming that 8GB flash makes the drive as good as SSDs. They are only claiming that it will be equivalent for most users.
dude. they TOTALLY ARE claiming it will make it as good as SSD.
"500GB, 7mm design for the latest thinnest laptops
1TB, 9.5mm design for maximum capacity laptops
Boots and performs like an SSD". that's their marketing material for it, for the 8gb nand models. now if you're claiming that they aren't claiming ssd like performance you're probably a lawyer working for seagate.
it isn't new even. they've been claiming this BS since they started selling them. I don't get why they don't just make a model with 64gbytes
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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.
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, Funny)
If you don't have most of your stuff stored via a library or other link on an NSA or server . . .
Wait a sec . . . How do you access all of your data at the NSA? do they offer a subscription service or something?
Re:Of course! And you never need more than 640K RA (Score:5, Funny)
How do you access all of your data at the NSA? do they offer a subscription service or something?
Yes, they do! [google.com]
Re:Of course! And you never need more than 640K RA (Score:5, Funny)
Man, Dropbox better watch out. Serious competition here.
But really, had the NSA pitched their product as a 'service', people would have fallen all over themselves to pay for it.
"Stores everything, everywhere! Never back up again!"
What's not to like?
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Wait a sec . . . How do you access all of your data at the NSA? do they offer a subscription service or something?
FOIA request. The latency is lousy, but you can't beat the reliability of the backup servers.
Re:Of course! And you never need more than 640K RA (Score:5, Funny)
Fumble fingers - meant to type NAS.
Sure you did.
Re:Of course! And you never need more than 640K RA (Score:5, Funny)
Fumble fingers - meant to type NAS.
Sure you did.
Absolutely! Would I lie to you, Mr. Joshua J. Fortenbras of 1104 W. Finster Ave, Quimby, NJ, who works at Asset Assure Investments (formerly Dewey, Cheatham & Howe). I trust you enjoyed your bacon and gerbil omlet, for breakfast this morning.
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Intel 330 Series 2.5" 180GB SATA 6Gb/s Solid State Drives
Too small, trying to replace a 250GB SATA 6. Currently on Samsung 840 Pro and that's what is giving me 'data read errors' on boot, two independent systems. Might be they are just not compatible with the controller. Some scribblings indicate the timing of the SSD is throwing the the controller, and there's now way to adjust settings with Samsung's SSD tools.
Re:Of course! And you never need more than 640K RA (Score:5, Insightful)
I've used an SSD. Works great for my laptop and router, don't care for it for my desktop largely due to price. For $60, I can get an 80GB SSD or I can get a 2TB HDD. That 80GB SSD is going to require an additional HDD anyway for storage for many people.
Most consumers are still going to go with cheapest and, outside of the tech-oriented crowd, don't really care if they have to wait an extra few seconds. As far as I'm concerned, the SSD boat is still boarding passengers and is no where close to leaving just yet. Once SSD prices are more competitive with hard drives (which could be another decade or two at the least), then you can say that ship has sailed. Until then, cost will trump performance for the largest markets.
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...that's if you ignore the performance benefits of using a SSD as your system drive
That's the amazing thing about a hybrid drive though, which is what Seagate is pushing. At $60 for 80GB of SSD, that's $66 for 8GB of flash cache on a 2TB HD. Best of all: NO ACTIVE MANAGEMENT.
I tried active management between my 64GB SSD(yes, on a budget) and a 1TB HD. What with my movement between games(love steam!), I found I was spending more time managing which games were on the SSD than I was saving from the faster performance.
Consider a 'manual' solution: All the OS drivers, manual files and ot
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I've actually had a first-generation hybrid drive (Momentus XT 500GB) where the SSD failed. It's not a critical failure, but it does cause a lot of oddities. I had issues with reads sometimes taking longer off the local disk than it did off a network share... in Durban. And yes, we have servers in Durban :) Anyway, yes the failure makes the operating system almost unusable (Windows) but I was easily able to recover to a new 2nd gen 750GB Momentus XT which has been rock solid reliable ever since.
Note that th
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Wake me up when I can get multi-TB SSDs at an affordable price.
For most people, regular HDDs are better. Not to mention quite a bit cheaper. I use one of my for backup, and that many write-erase cycles would be murder on an SSD. What's more, getting an 2TB SSD would be rather challenging.
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If I want a decent HDD setup, I get two with the longest warranty from WD. I've been doing this for the last decade. It's cheap and the setup always works.
If I want an SSD setup, I have no idea where to begin. Everyone says SSDs are faster, but no one says they've found them to be more reliable. Nor do I have consensus on a company which I can be confident about going to each time I want a system drive. Specs and prices seem to vary wildly in a way they don't for more mature HDD tech.
So, I currently have a
Re:Of course! And you never need more than 640K RA (Score:4)
> I currently have a 2 TB WD Black system drive - what do I replace it with?
You don't. You _augment_ it with an SSD.
OS + Critical (most often used) apps on the SSD. Everything else on the spindles.
The elephant in the room is that SSDs are unreliable so of course everything is backup on a NAS (Network Attached Storage) which you should be doing anyways, right?! I suggest FreeNAS http://www.freenas.org/ [freenas.org] which is based on BSD and supports ZFS. Even has a GUI if you don't want to mess around with the command line. Or if you use Linux you can use ZFSonLinux http://zfsonlinux.org/ [zfsonlinux.org]
If you just want to a buy an off the shelf solution that just works Drobo is OK.
http://www.amazon.com/Drobo-Storage-Gigabit-Ethernet-DRDS4A21/ [amazon.com]
For SSD can personally recommend
* Samsung 840 PRO Series http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147193 [newegg.com]
* Intel 320 or 520 Series http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&Description=intel+ssd [newegg.com]
Cheapest SSD prices are < $0.75 / GB. Just wait for them to go on sale (Black Friday, etc.)
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Sorry, bad Drobo link. Use this one instead:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=drobo%20nas [amazon.com]
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Seagate is just trying to be cheap and spinning this into the usual "geeks are irrelevant" kind of nonsense you usually see from Apple fanboys.
Ouch.... the cognitive dissonance there makes my head hurt.
Apple cares a lot about geeks, particularly geeks with fat wallets and a lust for shiny hardware.
*seductive whisper* retina display...
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Apple cares a lot about geeks, particularly geeks with fat wallets and a lust for shiny hardware.
*seductive whisper* retina display...
Exactly. Best laptop (possibly computer) I've ever bought.
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Apple cares a lot about geeks, particularly geeks with fat wallets and a lust for shiny hardware.
*seductive whisper* retina display...
Exactly. Best laptop (possibly computer) I've ever bought.
Oh hell yeah... it came up this weekend while I was visiting family..."Sure I spoiled myself, but let's remember that it's about 1/30th the price of a sports-car and a lot more safe."
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Unique data does not mean new data.
Also by using an SSD you can put less RAM in machines. Sure this will kill the SSD, but not in the short time people keep office computers.
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Unique Data doesn't mean "data that has never been touched before", it means "data that has not been touched in this 24 hour period"
So if I open a 100MB file five times today, it counts as 100MB of unique data for today. If I open it again four times tomorrow, it still counts as 100MB of unique data for tomorrow. It is NOT cumulative.
Also consider that locally installed programs count too, including the OS. That very easily adds up to 10GB even if all of the actual "data" files are stored non-locally.
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Very few people need 1TB on a laptop. Have a large external disk at home, and a smaller SSD in the laptop.
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This. Keep most of your data on a nice big RAID array, that gets backups each night. Let the laptop have an nice fast SSD.
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I don't agree with that. I like to have the ability to back up my data on the laptop. Now, granted it's not a true back up as you're still risking a disk failure, but for the more common things like fat fingering and filesystem corruption, it's perfectly fine.
Also, of that 1TB disk, you really only get to use about 750GB or so of it, when you factor in for the different units, leaving the 20% free and leaving space to restore things. Then when you account for the back up space, you're probably talking about
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http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148696
960GB SSD...not quite 1TB, but close enough. And all for $600, provided you can find a place that can keep them in stock.
And for someone sporting a MacBook, iPhone, and iPad, I don't think the price will exactly send you into sticker shock.
What about games (Score:4, Insightful)
The games I download from Steam are around 5GB each. So if I try playing two games in one day, only the first one will load quickly?
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Were you using a spinning disk now? Generally as soon as you say "game" it means you are probably not using "normal office computers" and can safely ignore spinning drives altogether.
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Yep, they mean Browser, Excel/Word, Outlook, etc...
Same reason why most office computers don't have 16GB of RAM; while gaming rigs do.
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Re:What about games (Score:4, Insightful)
The first time you load each game, it will load slowly.
If you close and reload a game, it will load quickly.
If you close a game, load another game, then load the first game it will load slowly again.
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The first time you load each game, it will load slowly.
If you close and reload a game, it will load quickly.
If you close a game, load another game, then load the first game it will load slowly again.
Um, not necessarily. It doesn't need to load the entire 5Gb of the game in order to provide good caching response. If you played the entire game, then exited, played the entirety of another game and *then* came back to the first then, yes, it *might* load slowly again.
However, if you load a game, play a level (or even a few), exit play another game for a level and went back to the first it is highly probable that your previous session will still be cached, but loading the next level *might* be slow (depe
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No.
The point of cache is to hold the data read in memory so it can be loaded again in a fast way.
Loading things for the first time will never be faster in a hybrid drive. Never.
That's the whole point of SSDs however.
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In other words, if you like 7200 cheap drives, buy one now or hope that competition won't follow suit.
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Depends on the game. RPG's, probably not. Strategy? All of it at once.
Re:What about games (Score:5, Funny)
I truly doubt that anyone working at EA plays their games.
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"Office Computer" = Windows, IE, and Office. Anything additional, however minimal, might be considered a non-Office Computer.
I'd rather have ... (Score:3, Insightful)
... all solid state in my laptop. I hate hybrids.
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.
Re:Hybrid drives on Linux? (Score:5, Insightful)
SSHDs as implemented by Seagate do not require any support whatsoever in the host. Their caching algorithm does not care anything about the FS. It is block level. I have one working just fine in arch linux. Linux just sees it as any other HD, only it is much faster overall. Obviously you will never see any improvement at all in huge file copies.
WD has some lame Windows-only SSHD tech that does require special software on the host.
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While it is true that seagate does hybrids at the block level so it is transparent, linux hit some bugs in the hard drives firmware that windows did not quite some time ago, and the results weren't so pretty. That was a few years ago though hopefully they have it sorted by now.
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.
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..
640K (Score:2)
"640K software is all the memory anybody would ever need on a computer." - Bill Gates (Not Really: http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1997/01/1484 [wired.com])
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Nobody ever said Bill Gates ever said that. The assertion was that he said that at the time that 640k ought to be enough for anyone. He has since avidly denied ever saying anything of the sort, but there is still some debate if anyone cares. [quoteinvestigator.com]
Damn (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Damn (Score:5, Insightful)
Although I do disagree on one point -- if a consumer uses ~10GB of data a day, I would overshoot and put in 16GB rather than 8GB in a Hybrid Drive -- it's better to slightly overprovision and almost never hit the platter part of the storage than to under provision and force yourself to the slower backstore. Plus the difference should only be less than $10 more for the drive.
One problem though with hybrid drives is they aren't necessarily faster than intelligent software caching to SSD's or of using a hardware controller (with possible software assist) that supports caching data from a HDD to a SSD (such as Intel Smart Response SSD Caching which has been on Motherboards since 2011).
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Hybrids are a terrible idea. The SSD has a failure rate, the HD has a failure rate, and by tying them together you get an even worse combined failure rate!
Ummm... citation please??? If you use a smaller amount of flash, you can use much more reliable chips (SLC or eMLC or MLC with 2 bits instead of 3). Also, SSD's almost always fail on write and you can mark lines that fail to write as bad and retry. You can make VERY reliable SSD's if you are not trying to provide the most Pure Flash capacity to consumers at the lowest cost (i.e. Enterprise SSD's that cost $10-20/GB and have at least 2X over-provisioning or underutilization of flash cell bits). A high re
Moving parts and fatigue (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Moving parts and fatigue (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Moving parts and fatigue (Score:5, Insightful)
The lifespan issue with SSDs has three main factors.
1: Type of flash memory (SLC, MLC, TLC, in order of decreasing durability)
2: Size of the flash drive (larger drives have more room for wear leveling algorithms to work with, thus staving off flash cell burnouts due to exceeding maximum number of writes).
3: The amount of throughput on the flash drive. An expected heavy load is roughly 10GB/day. Doubling the load halves the lifetime of the drive. Quadrupling the load quarters it.
Granted, the cache on a Hybrid is being used a bit differently than how you would use a straight SSD. But, with such a small cache drive, you ARE going to wind up cooking it after a relatively brief period of time.
Re:Moving parts and fatigue (Score:5, Informative)
Which for most users and usage scenarios, is basically forever. There's been a volunteer-run test of longevity [xtremesystems.org] which stresses an SSD until it fails by writing data to it continually. And the SMART data typically gives you plenty of advance warning - the Media Wear Indicator (MWI) tells you how many cycles are left in the array - once it hits zero, it means the number of write-erase cycles has hit the guaranteed limit and you're running in unknown territory (though there are usually still spare blocks and most will still have plenty of life). If you want guarantees, once the MWI hits zero, it's time to back up and get a new SSD. The tests run until the drive itself dies which tell you how long you have left. So you generally have a LONG indication of media wear out.
However, the biggest problem SSDs face is actually sudden loss and corruption of the FTL tables (the ones that map logical sectors to actual flash sectors). If you hear of SSDs dying prematurely, it's almost always because of table corruption. These tables contain things like sector translation, sector wear, dirty/clean bits, trim status, etc.
In the past, you could regenerate the tables from the spare area data (typically 16 bytes per 512 byte data area), but use of enhanced ECC algorithms consume that space up to accommodate better error handling. Plus it also meant way longer mount times as the controller had to scan the entire media for the information (many seconds long).
These days, controllers come with 512MB or more of RAM to hold the tables in memory for quick access. The problem is the tables are often written out lazily to storage, which means if you yank the power suddenly, the SSD might not be able to write the dirty data to stable media, or worse yet, it'll be in the middle of the write operation which leaves data in an unknown state.
Good SSDs often have piles of capacitors to serve as emergency power which can keep the array powered for a couple of seconds - more than enough time to flush the tables to storage and protect your data. Of course, this costs a lot more money and is usually present only in the top tier drives and enterprise class SSDs. If an SSD dies suddenly, it's usually because of this.
Hard drives use the back EMF produced by the spinning platters to perform emergency shutdown procedures, including retracting the heads.
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I'd assume hybrid drives to be just as good as pure HDDs, actually a bit better since the SSD part will save wear and tear on the HDD part. Bugs notwithstanding.
I'd expect the opposite. Large SSD are more reliable because of the large space available and wear leveling algorithms. Much of the data on an SSD will not be changing at all. The writing and erasing causes the wear on the SSD portion, while reading causes little/none. In a small solid state cache, like in the hybrid drives, each memory location will be subject to much more read/write/erase cycles than in a larger SSD.
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Shenanigans! What about NAND life expectancy? (Score:2)
Yeah. That's great.
Until you burn through that dinky little 8GB due to heavy read/write.
Then what? You now have a 5400 rpm hard drive.
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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:But their 5400RPM hybrid drives suck (Score:5, Insightful)
I took into account cost, capacity and performance when choosing the drives.
But not battery life, apparently, which is the one area where 5400 rpm drives beat out 7200 rpm drives, and is possibly the reason they even exist. A 5400rpm hybrid would need to spin up even less and should do even better on the battery front. Not to mention that if you get a cache hit, it doesn't have to spin up at all, which is a big performance boost too.
So while "benchmark" performance might not be great, real world use might be substantial; as the hard drive could spin down more, and you could access the drive without spinning it up some of the time, possibly even most of the time.
There's definitely potential to be both markedly faster in real world laptop use scenarios and consume less battery with a hybrid. Whether that pans out in reality I don't know.
Re:But their 5400RPM hybrid drives suck (Score:4, Informative)
I think that might be a red herring. The new Macbook Air has a 14 hour battery life.
And is also designed to minimize power. If you stuck a high performance 7200 rpm drive into it, it would make a big difference.
Skimming benchmark sites for laptop ssd vs 7200 rpm hdd seem to be all over the map, from 1/2 hr to 2+hrs difference depending on the laptop and settings (the more energy efficient the rest of the laptop is, the LARGER the difference the hard drive makes).
I'd like to see what percentage of that power is spent on the drive.
Depends on a lot of factors. And again, the more efficient everything else is the great the impact the HD choice will make.
Also SSDs idle more than HDDs, due to spin up times/seek times, and faster transfer times. So if even if an SSD and HDD had exactly the same ratings: for example: 0.5W idle, 1W seek/read/write, in most real-world scenarios the SSD will use significantly less energy because it spends much less time doing seek/read/write. For every 2 seconds of read/write the HDD does, the SSD will do 1. For every second of seek the HDD does, the SSD is still idle.
That makes comparing them by specs almost meaningless, you really HAVE to look at actual usage profiles.
RAM cache? (Score:2)
Why bother adding 8 gig of solid state storage to your hard disk when you could just add 8 gigs of RAM and use that for disk cache?
Re: (Score:2)
Not much use if half of the 8 gig is used for storing system files that are accessed on a reboot / cold boot that wipes the RAM.
Also 8GB of NAND probably costs $4, which is a lot less than 8GB of RAM.
Re:RAM cache? (Score:4, Insightful)
RAM cache is useless for speeding up writes. A significant (although workload-dependent) part of the performance problem with spinning disks is that if you issue a write and then need to block until it's on disk (which you need for consistency), it can easily take 5-10ms (or more) and that severely limits the performance. Often, non-server workloads include doing a lot of small synchronous writes and then no writes for a while. An SSD as a write-through cache works well here because it can reorder a lot of writes to turn (some of) them into sequential writes and it can trickle out a lot of writes while the disk is idle. This is also pretty much the best case for flash longevity: you don't need wear levelling, because you just treat the entire flash as a ring buffer and write to one end and write to the disk from the other end. You can keep the translation layer in RAM, and if there's a power failure you just replay the entire flash journal onto the disk.
The 'only reads 8GB' of unique data per day number is meaningless as an indication of how often each thing is used, however. If each day you always access the same 8GB, then an 8GB cache will be perfect for you. If you always access 8GB a day and you only access 7.5GB of it once, then a 512MB cache will be fine and you'll get no benefit from more, but you will get a big benefit from having a faster underlying storage device.
Not in my experience (Score:5, Informative)
I had a Seagate Momentus XT (750 GB hybrid) and I replaced it with a Samsung 750 GB SSD. The pure SSD solution is noticeably faster in all respects, especially in boot up, and this is with a machine now using Truecrypt whole disk encyption (wasn't using it on the Momentus).
The Momentus was a good upgrade until SSDs in the size I wanted were reasonably priced, but performance wise it isn't in the same league as a SSD.
The hybrid SSD solution really shows its weakness when you deviate from "normal" behavior, and this can be anything from an application upgrade, running Windows updates, or accessing stuff you don't use that much. Performance just seems back to dismal levels and I suspect that it takes a while for the cache to re-optimize if the deviating disk activity is at all intensive.
I think the hybrid concept is interesting, but I think you need more cache and a way to optimize the cache not just not most recently accessed blocks but for the operating system and applications in use, too.
Wrong choice (Score:2)
Yeah, but typical office PCs are already plenty fast for the things they typically do, so they aren't in need of a big boost. That's why PC manufacturers have been concentrating on making them smaller and cheaper rather than more powerful. It's those data sensitive applications that are atypical of office PCs that are the market for high performance drives.
Besides, if you only need 9.5 GB of unique data per day, you're probably better off upgrading your RAM rather than your hard drive. The stuff you ac
Re: (Score:2)
If you only need 9.5GB you should get a small SSD. RAM only helps once you fill the cache. RAM is never going to give you the performance you get from an SSD.
Redefine "hybrid" for the 21st Century (Score:2)
It seems that the word "hybrid" is being redefined in common use. It is now being used to combine one old outdated thing that needs to be put out to pasture with a new state-of-the-art idea.
"Just?" (Score:2)
Man, tell me I'm not the only one who still remembers a time when 8 Gb of RAM was a REALLY big deal. I still only have 8 Gb in my gaming computer and 6 in my laptop. Maybe I'm just old.
Re: (Score:3)
Nice idea in theory but I wonder about practice (Score:2)
I have the following concerns with hybrid drives.
1: After a new build or reimage (remember they are talking about office users here and offices do reimage from time to time) how long will it take the system to settle down and work out what should be on hdd and what should be on flash. There is obviously a compromise here between speed of adapting to a changed usage pattern and wear on the flash.
2: what will happen with writes? large SSDs spread them over a large area of flash to get decent life. Will writes
Hard drives are increasingly.. (Score:2)
.... too slow to do backups with if you have any sizable amount of data at all. Mirroring SSD's saves huge amount of time in cost and fiddling in terms of backing up important data.
Hard drives are really for huge libraries of stuff you want to keep but dont use often and dont mind slow backups on because they are of lower relative importance (movies, games ,etc).
Just buy more RAM (Score:2)
Not sure what people are thinking (Score:3)
SSD's are great, yes, but there are still too big problems with them.
1) Capacity and price. HDD are still significantly cheaper per GB and get up to 4TB per drive. Its a hard sell to offer a computer with only 128 GB or 256 GB of system storage when you can also find ones with 3 to 4 TB of storage.
2) SSD's are still using HDD technology. While SSD offer better performance than HDD, really SSD should be offering performance on par with RAM rather than physical spinning disk media. While come companies like Apple are hooking SSD directly to the PCI E bus, I would expect that a drive made of up solid state chips to perform more like RAM rather than really just being slightly faster than HDD.
I'm not saying I want HDD over SSD, but I mean I've been around long enough to know when SSDs were first promised as the "next great thing" and still greatly disappointed at the state they are in today.
I think the whole SSD industry dropped the ball as I have never seen an industry innovate at such as snails pace. SSD is a card full of chips, its not rocket science, and yet SSD still have read/write rate of decay, performance is not on par with RAM and prices are still ridiculous.
Now compare to the HDD industry? They exceeded perceived limitations on the amount of storage per inch of platter several times now. I mean this has been SIGNIFICANT feats of engineering to squeeze out more bit density and I mean they even moved to stacking bits vertically on the medium.
I don't know, there is no reason why we don't have Terabyte SSD's that cost $50 and rival RAM in speed today except that the SSD industry has either been unwilling to bring us this technology at this price point OR grossly incompetent to not be able to deliver the goods.
For now, if you can put 8 GB of cache into a 4 TB hard drive and deliver me comparable speeds to SSD for less money, I think this is a huge win for Seagate over all the negative bashing you all are giving them.
When SSD grows up and start matching HDD on price/capacity or delivering me speeds that make RAM obsolete, let me know, for now this has been an over-promised and underwhelming technology.
Also will people please stop assuming this is the same as "we only need 640k of RAM" or "only 9GB!" statement. Its retarded. They are not claiming that people only need 8 GB of storage in total but that on average on any given day, people are only accessing roughly 8 GB of storage so cache that much and give people high performance of SSD without the stupid expense of them, and yet still have terabytes of storage to access from.
Has anyone built a small Fusion drive? (Score:3)
Building a Fusion drive with 32 GB SSD (I suppose that's the smallest you can buy) and checking it in real life would be a good way to test this.
Isn't RAM caching cheaper? (Score:3)
Given that people buy machines with 8 and 16 gigs of RAM nowadays (if not more), isn't it more cost effective to just let the OS use that extra memory for caching instead of pushing the memory down to the drive? After all, the OS is making block level IO requests and has far more knowledge about what data it's going to use than the drive ever could.
And if they're not making 7200 rpm drives any more, then I'm not buying Seagate drives any more. I do not want laptop quality drives in my box -- I run databases and compilers and other such IO intensive loads far too often.
By the way, when I *rebuild* my projects, it takes about half the time of the initial build because all the source has been loaded into cache by Linux, so all it needs to do is *write* the outputs.
Perhaps I've answered my question about RAM cache vs. disk cache if and only if it's faster to write to SSD cache than it is to write to physical disk.
Re: (Score:2)
Nonsense...I standardize on them. Got a 1TB HGST 7200 RPM HD, paired up with the 240GB Corsair SSD. Granted, I am deeply interested in why my HD is operating in SATA-II mode instead of SATA-III, but the capacity / speed does seem somewhere near reported.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah their tech support guys strongly suggested they would charge me if I sent my hard discs back under warranty so I said screw them and have avoided them since. If they are not getting into the ssd market proper it suits me as I'll mainly only buy SSDs from now on.
Re: (Score:2)
What possible reason is there to move a pagefile to a ramdisk? If you've got ram to burn, then just get rid of the pagefile completely!