Seagate Believes in a Hybrid HDD Future, not an SSD One

[Rob Williams]

By the sheer number of SSD-related news posts that get put up in a given day, it's easy to imagine that almost everyone, and every company, are confidently standing behind the technology. But, that's not entirely the case, especially where mechanical hard drive vendors are concerned. Though Western Digital began releasing consumer SSDs earlier this year, lead competitor Seagate has not.

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Read the rest of our post and discuss it here!

 

[killem2]

I dunno seems like a huge waste of time. If the cost can be brought down below ssd, but almost match ssd, they might be on to something but like all tech it just seems like a matter of time then ssd will be the standard and prices will drop among the masses snatching it up.

 

[Optix]

Don't tell OCZ this. They just opened another fab plant to help cover the demand for their SSD's.

I agree with killem2 though. If the price can come down (a lot!) then they may have a winner. Anand's review shows it beating a VelociRaptor in a few tests but not giving much performance over a standard 5400 RPM drive in others.

It's a catch 22 for now. I wonder if increasing the NAND to 8GB would take care of it since it stores frequently used files? The average user would probably be ok with that since they use their rigs for specific tasks unlike some of the tech monkies around these parts.

 

[OriginalJoeCool]

As the Borg say, resistance is futile. SSDs will take over eventually, although HDDs will probably hang on for a while yet.

 

[Greg King]

I'm actually amazed that this is just now getting press. This idea has been around for a while and was supposed to be the industry's segway into SSDs for everybody. If they can make these affordable, and put a good amount of flash on the drives, I see the potential for this to be a successful product. I think that SSDs are still the future, but prices are still astronomical compared to platter based storage.

 

[Rob Williams]

I'm actually amazed that this is just now getting press. This idea has been around for a while and was supposed to be the industry's segway into SSDs for everybody. If they can make these affordable, and put a good amount of flash on the drives, I see the potential for this to be a successful product. I think that SSDs are still the future, but prices are still astronomical compared to platter based storage.

I do think things need to change a bit, but we're on the right path. The first problem with Seagate's solution is that it has a measly 4GB of NAND flash, so things like games, most applications and other things don't stand to see a real benefit over time. On the desktop side, I think it'd be cool to see a 64GB of NAND flash strapped to a 2TB hard drive, or something like that. With that, a lot more could be accelerated, as it were, while storage stuffs would remain in the storage part of the drive. Even things like games, if used all the time, could be shifted over to the NAND for quicker access.

Something like 64GB would add about $100 to the drive, and would be worth it overall I think. NAND will always be more expensive than mechanical storage, and even if we have 500GB drives, it sucks to think a lot of it will be used for storage, which is something we certainly don't need huge speeds for.