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Seagate: Winning the Battle of the Boot Drives

Seagate: Winning the Battle of the Boot Drives
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When the first generation of relatively inexpensive consumer solid state drives (SSDs) hit the market, thousands of early adopters jumped at the chance to make 40, 60, and 80 gigabyte (GB) SSDs their OS boot drives. And why not? Even then, the SSD’s ability to provide a quantum leap in boot time and app loading performance became legendary.

Unfortunately, those early drives came with their share of limitations, especially in their firmware. Without some of the optimizations found in today’s SSDs, those first-generation models often found their performance plummeting after a few weeks of use. The years since have brought us faster NAND flash chips, higher capacities, and much better overall SSD performance, but two problems remain: 1) While SSD capacities continue to climb, the cost per SSD GB remains huge relative to hard disk drives (HDDs)—roughly 90 cents/GB for a 256GB SSD compared to about 4.5 cents/GB for a 2TB 7200 RPM HDD, and 2) some people still maintain that low-capacity SSDs are of inherently poor quality.

In 2006, the market got its first taste of hybrid drives, also known as solid state hybrid drives (SSHDs). Hybrids integrate a conventional HDD with some amount of NAND flash, seeking to deliver the best of both technologies. However, critics often panned the first hybrids, claiming that they represented both the slow bottleneck of HDD technology combined with an insufficiently- sized SSD, complete with all of the well-known drawbacks of the latter due to immature firmware of the day. If that weren’t bad enough, hybrids debuted to a dearth of operating system drivers and lackluster third-party support. Thus first-gen hybrids quickly went back to the drawing board.

Since then, Seagate® has had several years to research, develop, and cooperate with the broader computing industry. The results can be seen in Seagate’s current Solid State Hybrid Drive (SSHD) models: the newly announced Seagate Laptop SSHD and Seagate Laptop Thin SSHD. Seagate SSHDs advertise that they are up to “4× faster than a traditional hard drive” and “boot and perform like an SSD.” Those are big claims, and critics may be justified in their skepticism. But the truth is that old biases remain, and the computing industry and technical press have yet to give the new breed of SSHDs a proper, methodical analysis.

To date, hybrids remain specific to the 2.5-inch form factor, and a combination of high capacity plus SSD-like speed make them ideally suited for laptops. However, Seagate recently announced the introduction of their new Desktop SSHD products. So soon, even budget-oriented desktop buyers may ask whether a hybrid can meet their boot time and overall high performance needs. When trying to save money, can a hybrid deliver the most bang for the buck? To begin answering that question, let’s dive into what SSHDs are and how they add value beyond conventional storage drives.