Seagate Announces First Hybrid Hard Drive

writertype writes "Today, Seagate announced about a dozen new products, including its first hybrid laptop hard drive that includes a 256-Mbyte flash chip to save power and speed up the time a notebook recovers from hibernation. Interestingly, the new Momentus 5400 PSD has also exceeded earlier estimates of hybrid hard-drive performance, which said that such drives would add an extra hour to the typical battery life of a notebook PC."

lifetime of flash?

[Chirs]

I'm a bit worried about how long that flash memory is going to last. It's got a limited number of write cycles, and presumably everything going to the drive goes through the flash cache.

Re:Death of Harddrives?

[flooey]

Given the rapid pace of development of flash memory, how long until hard drives are gone altogether? It would seem the breakout of flash memory in the marketplace is bringing us one step closer to relaible instant-on systems, with none of the tedious waiting for drives to spin up.

I'd imagine that hard drives will go away only once they find something akin to flash that isn't limited in the number of writes. Having a limit of a million writes is completely reasonable for iPods, cameras, and other devices where you do infrequent large writes. Having /tmp, home directories, or so forth on flash memory could burn it out pretty fast, though.

Having a flash device for the OS and programs and a hard drive for general purpose storage, though, that I could see being feasible in not too long.

Probably a good while yet

[Sycraft-fu]

Flash is getting better at an amazing rate but it's got a looooong way to go to catch HDs. You need more capacity, much less cost, and also higher speeds. While flash has faster random access, it can't hit the sustained transfer rates of HDs, at least not the normal flash RAM you find for sale everywhere.

I imagine the hybrid HDs will be the first step. Try and get the best of both worlds. A small flash store for frequently accessed thigns to get lightning fast random access, a large magnetic disk so you don't compramise on storage. Windows Vista is apparantly going to be pushing this rather hard. MS notes support for it as one of the features, and even if you lack a hybrid HD, you can get something similar by giving it a USB flash drive and instructiong Vista to use it as an app cache. Parts of programs are then put on the flash to speed load times.

I think that's the kind of thing we'l see for a number of years here until flash gets cheaper.

Re:Will it work?

[LnxAddct]

That is kind of like saying L2 cache is pointless because you can't fit 4 gigs of memory into it. Used wisely, this 256MB could be very useful.
Regards,
Steve

Re:Death of Harddrives?

[Surt]

Some flash is up to about 3 million writes already. At 10 million writes the problem is effectively solved, they'll be able to warranty their flash for continuous writes for about 5 years at that point, matching the warranty on your hard drive.

The write limit is not going to be the barrier to replacing hard drives for nearly as long as price and size are going to be.

Re:Will it work?

[ivan256]

What I want to know is what's the point in integrating the flash into the hard drive rather than just having it as an independent device that can be used how the software sees fit?

That requires software modification. As we know, most users are running either the current incarnation or the previous incarnation of Microsoft Windows. A change to Windows that would use such a device would be two versions out, which means three PC lifecycles before said seperate flash device has any signifigant market share.

In other words, they made it this way so they could sell them now.

Rewrites and other musings...

[Xichekolas]

First, the rewrite limit on flash nowdays is in the low millions... so even if you could only rewrite a million times, and you did it 100 times a day (about once every minute and a half)... the drive would last over 27 years... Not sure why everyone keeps bringing up this longevity issue. Sure, don't put temp files or virtual memory on it... every time Windows pulled a thrash maneuver you'd lose 8% of your HD lifespan ;) ... but for storing OS boot files and commonly used system files, the lifespan thing isn't a problem... That said, I think they should put a flash socket on the mobo so the stuff is upgradable if you want larger capacity. That way, you wouldn't have to buy a new HD to get more flash memory or vice versa...

Re:Will it work?

[Ender Ryan]

What I want to know is what's the point in integrating the flash into the hard drive rather than just having it as an independent device that can be used how the software sees fit?

Compatibility and ease of integrating into existing systems I'd assume.

Re:drives are faster, too

[NeMon'ess]

Congrats, your post gives the impression you're basing your opinion of Seagate quality just on a bad experience with one 7200.9 drive. How very scientific and valid your statistics are. StorageReview.com is much more comprehensive.

Huh?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

At a max of about 2.5W on write, a notebook hard drive isn't the biggest power draw in a notebook. Idle power is maybe half that.

You have the screen (flourescent backlight) (likely tens of watts) and the CPU (Intel Core Duo is 31W), probably the GPU too. Cutting the CPU to an LV chip (Core Duo LV is 15W) might give you a two or four more hours, depending on the display and the GPU. Don't tell me that saving one watt is going to save an hour of power on battery time.

Re:Death of Harddrives?

[Surt]

You have to factor in defect balancing because you can't come anywhere close to writing the entire memory every 5 seconds. It takes closer to 30 minutes.

oh really?

[dirtyhippie]

Samsung forecast that the first hybrid drives would ... reduce power consumption by about 9 percent overall, increasing a notebook's battery life by about an hour.

Uh... Someone in Samsung's PR division does not realize that the typical laptop does not get 11 hours of battery life. There has got to be a way to hold PR folks accountable for the stupid and wrong things they say.