SSHDs Debut On the Desktop With Mixed Results 154
crookedvulture writes "Seagate's solid-state hybrid drives have finally made it to the desktop. The latest generation of SSHDs debuted with a 2.5" notebook model that was ultimately hampered by its slow 5,400-RPM spindle speed. The Desktop SSHD has the same 8GB flash payload and Adaptive Memory caching scheme. However, it's equipped with 2TB of much faster 7,200-RPM mechanical storage. The onboard flash produces boot and load times only a little bit slower than those of full-blown SSDs. It also delivers quicker response times than traditional hard drives. That said, the relatively small cache is overwhelmed by some benchmarks, and its mechanical sidekick isn't as fast as the best traditional hard drives. The price premium is a little high, too: an extra $30 for the 1TB model and $40 for the 2TB variant, which is nearly enough to buy a separate 32GB SSD. Seagate's software-independent caching system works with any operating system and hardware platform, so it definitely has some appeal. But dual-drive setups are probably the better solution for most desktop users."
bcache (Score:2, Interesting)
I must say I find Linux's bcache much more appealing than hardware hybrids. I'm also not sure how this new hybrid drive would cope with software full disk encryption.
Had one in a laptop (Score:5, Interesting)
I had one of the laptop versions for about a year and a half now, and it's definitely an improvement over a traditional drive and considerably cheaper per GB than an SSD.
I'm not sure why the majority of the population wouldn't opt for these as they still give you decent capacity and speed over dedicated HD or SSD drives.
Sure they're not as good as a dedicated setup with a SSD and a HD, but then again, the average user can still install everything on their C: drive without making any changes from the default installation.
not actually write caching blocks copied to flash (Score:5, Interesting)
I looked at buying one of these. Writes don't really go to flash. Selected blocks are asynchronously copied to flash.
There's cool way to avoid the cash over use you mention that I wish someone would make in an under $500 drive. Have 4GB of flash, 4GB of DRAM, and a capacitor. Random writes go to DRAM, making random io a thousand times faster. On power failure, the capacitor flashes the contents of the DRAM to the flash. You get the speed of DRAM, crash safety, and 3TB of capacity from the underlying spindle.