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Hybrid Drives Ready at Last

Seagate - The Year in Storage
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Brought to you by What's this

The initial enthusiasm for hybrid cars waned considerably when many curious buyers learned that the new, battery-aided engine technology would cost several thousand dollars more than their gas-only counterparts. The price gap left many wondering if hybrid cars were worth it. How many years would you have to drive the vehicle in order to recoup the higher sticker price in gas savings? For legions of buyers, the answer was “too long.”

But what if hybrid cars only cost $1,000 more than equivalent gas models? Or what if there was no price difference at all? The answer seems obvious. People would flock to hybrids like bees to honey.

The situation may be analogous to solid state hybrid drives (SSHDs), meaning hard drives that integrate some amount of NAND flash memory to perform as a sort of high-speed cache space for frequently accessed data. When Seagate and Samsung released the first SSHDs in 2007, there was much fanfare. The drives were expected to deliver all of the capacity benefits of hard drives with the outrageous performance of SSDs. Unfortunately, the technology flopped in a big way. Only having 256 MB of NAND onboard was one problem, but far more crippling were driver issues with Windows Vista. SSHDs were virtually dead on arrival and stayed that way for nearly three years.

In 2010, Seagate released its second-generation hybrid, the Momentus XT. This model increased the NAND up to 4 GB and cooperated much more effectively with the ReadyBoost features in Windows 7. In short, the second-gen model worked, and many reviews highlighted cases in which the drive did in fact yield noticeable performance benefits. But it still cost more than similar capacity hard drives, and there was still room for improvement in its speed.