Hybrid Drives Struggling In Face of SSDs 256
Lucas123 writes "New numbers show hybrid drives, which combine NAND flash with spinning disk, will double in sales from 1 million to 2 million units this year. Unfortunately for Seagate — the only manufacturer of hybrids — solid-state drive sales are expected to hit 18 million units this year and 69 million by 2016. Low-capacity, cache SSDs, which typically have 20GB to 40GB of capacity and run along side hard drives in notebooks and desktops, will see their shipments rise even more this year to 23.9 million units, up by an astounding 2,660% from just 864,000 units in 2011. Shipments will then jump to 67.7 million units next year, cross the hundred-million-unit mark in 2015, and hit 163 million units by 2016, according to IHS iSuppli. If hybrid drives are to have a chance at surviving, more manufacturers will need to produce them, and they'll need to come in thinner form factors to fit today's ultrabook laptops."
Unfortunately for Seagate? (Score:5, Insightful)
How is this unfortunate for Seagate? Sure, more pure SSDs are being sold than hybrids, but there is more competition in that market, whereas hybrids are a market Seagate completely owns that is expecting 100% year-to-year growth. Seems to me, there is no bad news for Seagate in that.
No Thanks (Score:3, Insightful)
You can keep your shitty caching schemes and your hybrid drives (which are just shitty caching schemes in a black box).
SSDs all the way. If I need bigbadstorage, I buy multiple SSDs.
The only problem I have with SSDs is the inability to securely erase shit without blanking the entire drive.
Yeah, it costs more, but I get assloads of performance and power savings out of it.
I just wish someone would make 3.5" drives besides OCZ. Hell - I wish someone would make 5.25" drives.
Re:Unfortunately for Seagate? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No Thanks (Score:4, Insightful)
Hell, you can keep your 5.25" drives. Wake me when they bring back 8" drives. And what's this Flash nonsense? Get me a direct connection and DDR3 RAM backed up by a battery instead. Solves the whole 'securely erase' thing, too. Yeah, it costs more, but... etc.
I don't understand why HDD makers don't do it (Score:4, Insightful)
We love those little Seagate drives at work, put them in laptops all over. They are a great way to get plenty of storage for not too much money and still have decent performance. No they don't compare to real SSDs, but neither does the price.
Heck I use SSDs and I still have one. My new laptop has a 256GB SSD for the OS and apps drive, and a 750GB Seagate HHDD for data. Reason is those suckers perform like desktop harddrives. I'll spend the bit extra for the cache to have good performance, but it isn't feasible for me to go all SSD, just too much money (I play with audio that involved a few hundred GB of samples).
Re:Unfortunately for Seagate? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because some people think that not being number one is the same as being a loser.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Unfortunately for Seagate? (Score:4, Insightful)
If anecdotal evidence on SSDs scares you perhaps you should re-review Google's hard data on hard disk failures. Certain brands of SSDs are already many times more reliable than hard drives if looking at failure rates over time. Hard drives are no more reliable. You will find plenty of anecdotes in NewEgg reviews of people buying x number of hard drives and y number of them arriving DOA or dying in 3 months.
http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/en/us/archive/disk_failures.pdf [googleusercontent.com]
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923-6.html [tomshardware.com]