Seagate Unveils Its Third Generation SSHDs
The company's new lineup of SSHDs aims to "deliver blazing-fast performance and high-capacity at an affordable price".
Seagate has announced that it has begun shipping its latest generation of Solid State Hard Drives (SSHDs) which are effectively "hybrid drives" since they combine a mechanical hard drive with NAND memory for increased performance. Notable products in the company's 3rd generation of SSHDs include a new 7 mm thin SSHD designed for ultra thin laptops and Seagate's first ever desktop SSHD.
Both versions are advertised as providing SSD-esque performance at a fraction of the cost of a dedicated Solid State Drive, more specifically the laptop SSHD is five times faster than a standard 5400 RPM notebook drive and will improve overall system performance by 30 to 40 percent, according to PC Mark Vantage tests. Similarly the desktop variant will provide four times the performance of a 7200 RPM mechanical HDD and provide a boot time that can be measured in seconds rather than minutes.
Seagate's laptop drives will be available with a maximum capacity of 500 GB and 1 TB for the 7 mm "ultra thin" and normal SSHDs respectively and the desktop version will have a maximum capacity of 2 TB paired with 8 GB of NAND memory.
“Seagate’s engineers have really out done themselves this time. Our new SSHDs serve up your favorite content with the lightning-fast performance you have to experience to believe. With these new drives it’s like adding a turbo-charge to your PC, without having to sacrifice capacity, at a price that’s easy on your wallet,” said Scott Horn, Seagate’s vice president of marketing. “Now consumers can create, store and consume digital content like a pro without having to spend like one.
For more information on Seagate's 3rd Generation SSHDs, visit the relevant product page on Seagate's website.
The obvious exception to this (and the main market for this) is computers with only 1 drive space such as macs or laptops. But even in those cases you would still probably be better off with a SSD and external USB3 HDD.
Perhaps 32GB would suffice. 64GB would be acceptable I think, enough to cache most regularly accessed data (OS, software, etc).
I honestly think it would be better to invest in one of those "SSD cache" drives designed to supplement normal HDDs than to bother with these SSHDs. Much more cache for your money.
So 32 GB for 1 TB. 32-64 GB for 2 TB. 64 GB for 4 TB. 128 GB for 10-16 TB, etc.
8GB? Yeah.. no. We'll try again next year. Or not. Time for full-blown SSD I think.
8GB is pathetic Seagate, and you're pathetic for even considering going so low.
I would agree if we are talking desktops since you can toss in a SSD and a HDD, but these are actually a decent solution for someone on a laptop that needs a lot of storage, but also wants fast boots (a college student would be a perfect example).
I wouldn't put one of these in a desktop though, since once the HDD portion dies, the SSD portion is wasted. Two separate drives and you can replace each part individually.
Considering how much of a premium Seagate charges for its SSHD's, we really should be seeing something more than this. 2TB with a pathetic 8GB NAND? Really? Chances are it'll cost at least double the current market price of the (admittedly very fast) 2TB Barracuda, while providing only minimal improvements as constrained by its small NAND Cache!
One thing I love about the Momentus XT drives, is that they are phenomenal in RAID arrays (RAID0, RAID6, RAID10) as the 8GB NAND "stacks" and eventually becomes PLENTY for the amount of spinny-space given. I just don't see that happening with 2TB of platter storage without an increase in NAND.
Been running 8x Momentus XT 750GB/8GB SSHD's in RAID0 off an Adaptec PCI-E3.0 24i-4e RAID Controller (4GB DDR3-1333 cache, CacheVault) for a year now, as my "fun"/"let's see how fast it'll go" RAID0 array.
Home Server case is a Lian Li D8000 double-wide, and thanks to the small form-factor of the Momentus XT drives, I simply added a pair of 4-in-3 Bay Adapters with 120mm fans blowing across the drives. Stuck in 8x 1x3.5-to-2x2.5 adapters to give them room to breathe (a few share space with some SSD's), and no problems!
Total Capacity: 6TB Mechanical + 64GB SLC NAND
Sequential READ: 637-661MB/sec
Sequential WRITE: 656-683MB/sec
BURST SPEEDS: >5GB/sec when the file is entirely cached!
Overall, it's not as fast as another 8-drive array I have, this one of 1TB VelociRaptors in RAID0, all short-stroked to 333GB/ea, with a 64GB Intel SLC NAND Cache Drive, but it's only lagging about 20% behind; however, the XT array simply cannot even come close to touching the VR's in Random R/W performance, with the VR array literally pushing 10-15x the IOPS.
I don't use any SAS drives (well, not any 15krpm ones) in my home servers, as I already saturate all my ethernet bandwidth (and that's with an Intel Hardware Dual-gigabit NIC + 2x onboard Intel NIC's per server; all desktops have at least 2 onboard Intel NIC's, 2 have PCI-E hardware NIC's).
At this point, if WD doesn't come through with REAL Hybrid Drives, I am just going to turn to RAID for PURE STORAGE, running RAID6+HS arrays in my 2 media servers, my file server, and my local shared server (leave my Games servers running RAID0). Instead, I'll just grab an OCZ R4 or equivalent PCI-E SSD, which takes up so much less space yet is an order of magnitude faster (at the minimum)!
As a builder of systems to a lot of non-techy folks, I love these drives as a solution.
Why not judge it based on performance, rather than based on how much flash you think they should have included? They don't need to cache an entire program - if most of the program can be loaded with a sequential read, you might as well service that operation from disk and just load the small random files from cache. These work very differently from a manual (or even a software-based) solution using a separate HDD and SSD.
If there is not very big difference in the speed.
I was sure that In this year we would see hybrid drives with much larger ssd cache, but I seems to be wery wrong in that. The reason I can only gues, but I have two possible explanations. 8Gb is the sweet spot. It gives enough boost to system boot up time and does not cost too much. Or the price of hybrid would be too close to real SSD with much bigger SSD cache... I would like to know the truth in here...
You have a very valid point and while I agree with the fact that implementation is key to making a lesser amount of NAND perform well with the rotational media you can't argue against 8GB being too small. These drives would be able to cache a lot more of Windows/OSX/Linux in addition to the key files in many more programs if they came with NAND somewhere in the range of 24-32GB. With that much NAND vs. 8GB (a pen-drive amount of flash IMO) I can't help but feel that the hybrid drives would feel and perform like a real SSD except with storage for video/audio files and so on.
Last year, I used a THG Tier 1 SSD (128 GB Mushkin Chronos Deluxe) and one of the fastest HD's on the market (2 Gb Barracuda XT) and compared it with the 2nd Generation 750GB Momentus.
Having various users sit down and load AutoCAD 13, Adobe, Open Office, etc ...... none could tell the difference between two machines (Same CPU, MoBo, Memory) with the only difference being the storage subsystem. There were some slight differences in load times for the SSD / HD over the hybrid but you needed a stop watch to measure them. Here's some results:
Hybrid Booted windows in 17 seconds
SSD / HD Combo booted in 16 seconds
Hybrid loaded MMO in 45.5 seconds
SSD / HD loaded MMO in 45.5 seconds