News Seagate releases new hybrid drive

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/10/09/seagate_releases_new_hybrid_drive/1

Many of us have been looking forward to the hybrid drive - part NAND flash memory, part platter drive. Seagate has finally delivered its offering, aimed at the laptop segment.

 

Shame they are not doing the Barracuda 7200.11 in sizes less than 500gb, it would be nice to have one as a boot drive instead of the Raptor i have been dreaming about.

 

What's wrong with a half TB bootable? They're cheap...

Sadly, the .11's are pretty difficult to find atm - for us Canucks, NCIX has the 750s and 1Ts - but no 500s yet. They have the PSD's too... but all special order.

 

--Fixed, thanks! - Da Dego

 

Seems a bit of a waste, and I like to keep my stuff separate from my OS. If i had a 500gb drive, I would fill it up with rubbish.

 

I heared the end results of this hybird drive disappoint:
http://www.dailytech.com/Seagate+Hybrid+Hard+Drives+Ship+and+Disappoint/article9195.htm

 

comes down to what you're looking for, I guess. That's why I was very specific that the specs don't differ from the 5400.3 drives. What DOES differ is the massive battery life improvement. Remember how we are always talking as consumers about cramming more benefit in the same power envelope? Well, you could use that flash to speed up the drive but keep the battery life constant, or you could recognize you're working on a laptop drive and try to keep performance the same while bringing down power draw. Seagate chose the latter, and personally I think it was a wise decision.

 

The initial reviews I've seen of anything related to the "ready" technologies haven't really impressed me TBH. Brett have you got a link for the battery life savings you mention? Would be interested to know what the "true" bottleneck is to performance with flash based technologies like Readydrive and readyboost. Is it the speed of the flash, the amount of flash, the OS Drivers or something else? I have no doubt that hybrid drives and SSDs will play a key part in the future of storage so will be interesting to see how the market develops.

 

the size of the flash is to small to make much performance or batt life

it at all when the OS is heavy and bloted (it work wunders on XP tho 128mb boot the rest for other programs if it was supported) the cache on the disk needs to be 1gb to start off from and 2gb if you want the hdd to stay not spinning for longer times as thats what haveing flash on the hard drive is for so the hard disk can stop spinning for longer and save power 256Mb or 1gb can not do that
with 2gb of flash on the disk that you will find optons for hard disk power down more offen as well the Flash is faster access times then an laptop hdd and the Flash can have faster data rates then the laptop disks more so when there is random access going on (0.2ms flash / 10-15ms hdd with an Masive impact on file random read performace)

its more an problem with the hard drive Vista ReadyDrive cant work well at all with 256mb of flash its likey trying to run vista with 512mb of ram its to small to be usefull unless vista ReadyDrive uses it for Small files Only like it does for rederyboost (usb sticks)

 

I still don't understand this tech

How is constantly starting/stopping the drive going to help anything, id rather have less battery life then my HDD dieing after a year

 

that's just it, due to the solid-state flash holding the most accessible/needed data the HDD is accessed less, which in turn draws less power and less noise

I just wish they bring an SSD out for desktop usage.....faster read/write times for OS's and games if there's enough flash memory available.....I seriously can't wait.....

 

How would these work in raid?
My new Toshiba X200 lappy should arrive tomorrow and just for shits n giggles I was planning to put in a couple SSD drives in raid 0.
Only problem with that is HUUUUGE cost (and I'm currently a poor student ).
So if you could use these in raid to combine the cache it would be handy.

Can't see it working though since the raid controller basically makes the two drives appear as one.
Would be interested in knowing for sure though.

 

What's the life expectancy of the flash portion (under heavy use)? What happens if / when that part (with limited read / write cycles) dies? The extra level of cache is interesting but how safe is it? Those are the questions that would keep me from buying. Could they use a DRAM module instead?

 

The flash is only 256mb, its not going to hold that much

And when it gets asked for something not in flash (or when the flash is full of stuff to write) the disc has to be spun up - and that has to mean the disc will be spinning up and down all the time, which must wear it out pretty fast

 

flash mem is too small to do anything

 

The Flash memory isn't meant to hold all your data. Why do you think hard drives have cache in the first place?

The Flash holds only frequently accessed data - the core files of the operating system for example, or any other files you might have open. When most people use laptops they tend to do one thing for a reasonable period of time, such as write a Word document or browse the Internet. 256MB of cache is enough to hold any files that are frequently accessed during these activities and eliminate frequent referral back to data on the platters of the hard drive.

Also, sorry to be a cpemma (), but the article should read "waiting with bated breath" rather than "baited".

 

OK so it's perhaps not enough for Vista, it's perfect for XP, but how would this affect much smaller operating systems? I'm running DSL on an old laptop that sorely needs a new HDD to drag some life out of it! Performance isn't an issue at all, it's only used for dull stuff, but a little more battery life never hurt, and it'd be something worth salvaging if the thing died!

 

Do you need drivers to make the drives work properly?
ie, will it work in Linux and XP etc or does it need Vista's new cache-boost type stuff?

Also, can you manually control what goes in there?
You might want to put specific things in there to make it faster for what you want to do rather than what the system thinks you might do.
ie, games etc.

And anyone know the answer to the previous question about RAIDing these?

 

You need Vista to take full advantage of it. under XP or other OS it might work, but just as a normal HDD.