Seagate Experimenting with Hybrid Flash/HDD
Seagate Experimenting with Hybrid Flash/HDD
Posted 05/19/2010 at 2:10pm
| by Paul Lilly
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Wouldn't it be great if you could combine the speed of a flash-based drive with the capacity of a mechanical hard drive? Why yes, it would be, but don't get your hopes up too high. It's true Seagate is preparing a new series of hybrid drives that will combine NAND flash memory with HDD platters, but these aren't taking the extremes of either technology and meshing them into a single unit.
Instead, the largest drive will check in at 500GB, according Fudzilla. The other two capacities Seagate plans to offer for its upcoming Momentus XT line will be 320GB and 250GB. All three drives will also come equipped with 4GB of fast SLC NAND flash memory, as well as a 32MB cache buffer, but they'll be limited to SATA Gbps.
It's defeintely an intriguing idea as the mainstream market waits for SSD pricing to approach pedestrian levels, but we'd like to see some hybrid models on tap with more of a performance punch and storage space.
No word yet on US pricing or availability, but after the exchange rate, it looks like these hybrid drives will sell for between $115 to $160.
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DasHellMutt
May 20, 2010 at 2:02pm
Why is this news? This isn't new. It was done a few years ago and nobody bought it because there was next to no performance gain accompanied by a price increase. They were totally lackluster and all the manufacturers stopped making hybrid drives as far as I'm aware due to slow sales. Why in the world would they try this again?
riopato
May 20, 2010 at 9:58am
has been for consumers since at least 2007. Prices for hybrid hasn't been competitive compared to regular drives that are just getter larger what seems to be every week. SSD prices were dropping also, so why bother with hybrids? It would make more sense at this point to have 16 or 32gbs of nand chips coupled to at least 1tb mechanical drives.
The tech does sound solid though. Stream mostly used data from mechanical drive to flash while having access to the mechanical side. Although the tech still needs to be proven, it's a good option as long as the price, performance and reliablity is there!
arch-chancellor
May 19, 2010 at 5:52pm
Will you be able to choose on which part to install apps? I would like to be able to install Windows on the flash part and everything else on the spindle part.
chronium
May 19, 2010 at 6:51pm
Well the SSD is only 4GB so if your planning on using a shrunken down version of XP you wont be using it to insall programs. It's probably meant to just be used for data dipping (can't think of the term right now).
COMMANDER_COOK
May 19, 2010 at 6:15pm
I would think that it would detect which sectors are most frequently accessed on the hdd and then cache them to the NAND, which sounds awesome to me.
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