News Western Digital still pushing forward with its hybrid drives

Their profits have soared in 12 months although it's not clear what percentage of that is from hybrid drives but as they say most interest and sales for hybrid drives is from OEM's, they must think there is a market for hybrid drives but getting into a price war with Toshiba and Seagate over a product that is one of those transitional products that will surely eventually be dropped for pure SSD's does not seem like the best business practice

As said, It may be a clever idea but with SSD prices falling who is going to continue to buy hybrids, surely when SSD's become as cheap as HDD's even the OEM's who seem to be the biggest hybrid market will use SSD's to keep their PC prices down, again I have to defer to the experience and knowledge of WD but it seems like a lot of work and investment for a product that will be outclassed and out-priced in maybe two years at the most? Surely it would be better for WD to spend that investment money on SSD development or some other future storage systems?

 

With most computers to this day, still shipping with plain old HDDs, I do think think this will be a positive stepping stone, especially as NAND prices continue to fall, and they can move toward getting 32GB-64GB of flash integrated.

After all, the problem we are dealing with here is consumer stupidity and we all know that:

2000GB is 15x faster then 128GB
pictures of kitty in a dress should be saved on my desktop, not that funny looking D:

 

You nailed down the biggest problem that SSD's face infiltrating the non-power user market. SSDs are fantastic and the majority of users would benefit greatly from a 64 or 128GB "Operating System and System Intensive Applications ONLY" SSD and a 1TB "Everything Else" drive; but the majority of users also save everything to their desktop and have no idea what changing a program's install directory means.

There's a gap in the market for software which creates a virtual hybrid drive out of an SSD and a mechanical hard drive that is specifically designed to control install and save locations. It would be great of the user simply saved everything to their Users folder, but the Users folder was automatically mapped to a mechanical hard drive while important operating system files are on the SSD. A whitelisted set of programs could be set to install to the SSD, everything else goes on the mechanical drive. Basically wrap everything that any decent power user is doing with their SSD/mechanical combination and automate it.

 

I actually use a Momentus XT as my games storage drive and use a 120GB SSD as a boot drive. As I tend to play the same game for a while at a time it sits nicely in the cache and you get great load times but plenty of space.

Surprisingly, even games off the cache seem to load pretty quick too.