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Other Benefits

Has the Hybrid Drive Era Arrived?
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While the cost/performance/capacity value proposition looks compelling for hybrid drives already, Seagate expects the technology’s cost premium to drop to perhaps $20 as volumes climb. Moreover, we’ve discussed only the most obvious benefits so far, but there are others.

Many users don’t realize that the Momentus XT uses SLC NAND memory. Of the two types of NAND used in SSDs, SLC and MLC, the former has long been the preferred choice of enterprises for mission critical tasks. This is because SLC is superior in both performance and endurance, meaning how long data can be reliably retained by the storage medium. Traditional estimates indicate that SLC memory cells can withstand 100,000 write cycles while MLC can only handle 10,000.

“With flash in the hard drive, reliability goes up,” says Seagate’s Burks. “That’s because you’re going to be spinning the drive less, and that cuts down on wear and tear on the drive. What really tends to wear out an SSD is writing. What we do is mostly read from the flash and mostly write to the hard drive, which has a very high write cycle threshold. And it turns out that, the way workloads are managed, you do mostly reading from the SLC. It plays into the strengths of both components.”

As mentioned earlier, the alternative to getting flash memory benefits without a hybrid drive is to have an SSD. As occasional users of this approach, we would argue that any drive smaller than 60GB is impractical as a boot drive for modern Windows with a fair number of installed applications, and even 80GB drives have proven vexingly small in this role. Still, even budget-class 60GB SSDs now start at about $80. Do the addition and you’ll see that the hybrid is more cost effective for those wanting a balanced, accelerated storage solution.

More importantly, a hybrid drive only consumes one drive bay. This becomes a critical consideration in the mobile market. Open nearly any notebook, particularly in the lightweight segments, and you’ll only find one drive bay inside. There is physically no way to install an SSD boot drive backed by a high-capacity HDD short of going with an external drive, which carries its own penalties in performance and inconvenience for those trying to travel light. (We advocate external drives for backup and/or temporary project purposes, but we can’t see using one as a primary data drive.) For a notebook user who wants high storage performance and high storage capacity (600GB or higher), there are only two choices: drop at least $1,000 for an SSD or buy an affordable hybrid like the Momentus XT.

The reasons to opt for a hybrid drive now seem more than sensible. Most of the early generation issues experienced with hybrids have been long resolved. As reviews continue to emerge proving these points, we expect increasing numbers of consumers and small businesses to opt for hybrids and recognize it for the affordable performance booster it is.

“You take a little of this NAND technology, marry it to a hard drive, and get essentially 90% of the benefit of an SSD,” says Burks. “The two technologies combine to yield what the market really needs: SSD-like speeds, hard drive-level capacities, and price points that work. The hybrid approach will have a significant impact on the storage market over the next few years.”