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Adaptive Memory & Reality

Has the Hybrid Drive Era Arrived?
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“The read performance issue is overstated on average,” says Seagate’s Burks. “Yes, when the host needs data that is not currently in flash, it must retrieve the data from the HDD portion. But overall, this still does not have a significant impact on performance for most applications. Some workloads, say like video surveillance, would not see any significant benefits using –Hybrid technology because the application workload is skewed toward writing. The same is true in other circumstances where you are streaming very large data sets.”

Burks notes that this technology will improve over the coming years. There is “a significant amount of invention opportunity” in the field of how to get data into the SSD portion of hybrid drives before the application actually requires it. Innovation on this front will shrink the gap between hybrid and SSD performance even more.

Performance

Naturally, performance improvement is the first benefit most people demand from new PC components, so let’s dig into this issue. The average PC user will tell you that the first thing to upgrade for more performance is the CPU, followed likely by more system memory. Gamers or those interested in photo and video editing may add a higher-end graphics adapter to the list. Relatively few users are likely to mention storage.

This list of component priorities overlooks one key fact of PC architecture: if the CPU has to wait for data to stream in from storage, the entire system suffers. Like a sports car stuck behind a bicycle on a one-lane street, the storage subsystem’s performance becomes the bottleneck to overall speed. IT managers are keenly aware of this situation. They understand that insufficient storage bandwidth will leave their racks of servers languishing with underutilized (and not inexpensive) processors. This is one of the main reasons why SSDs and cutting edge storage architectures are gaining so much popularity in data centers.

According to Seagate, all other factors being equal, a 7200 RPM hard drive will outperform a 5400 RPM drive by about 30%. Direct pricing comparisons are becoming difficult as the slower drives continue to drop from the market, but Seagate’s own 5900 RPM Barracuda Green 1.5 TB sells online for roughly $100 while the 7200 RPM equivalent Barracuda sells for $130—a 30% price delta for a 30% performance delta.

Meanwhile, if we turn to the Seagate Momentus XT 750 GB hybrid, current online sources price around $155 while the non-hybrid 7200 RPM Momentus 750 GB sells for about $110. So we have a 36% price difference, which may seem steep, but is it justified given the hybrid’s performance?

We received a bucket of raw benchmarking results from Seagate showing drive testing across a range of CPUs (Intel Core i3, i5, and i7), memory amounts (4 GB, 8 GB, 12 GB, and 16GB), and hard drives (Seagate Momentus XT 750 GB, WD Caviar Green 5400 RPM 1 TB, Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM 1 TB). These various configurations were then tested with the storage workloads contained in PCMark 7.