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Hybrid: Core Concepts

Seagate: Winning the Battle of the Boot Drives
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The previous generation Momentus XT SSHD has a 7200 RPM spindle speed, which is typical of higher performance, 2.5-inch client HDDs. However, newer models like the Seagate Laptop SSHD and Laptop Thin SSHD have migrated toward 5400 RPM rates. Vendors such as Seagate are now so confident of the performance improvements offered by the drives’ NAND memory that they believe the impact of a slower spin speed will be negligible, especially when weighed against the lower power consumption and higher reliability the platters will bring.

Seagate SSHDs integrate 8GB of NAND flash. This is a significant increase from the 256MB of NAND embedded in the original Seagate Momentus 5400 PSD hybrid. Still, the knee-jerk reaction of many consumers may be to assume that 8GB is too little. After all, Windows 7 alone consumes almost 6GB, and isn’t much of the point to be able to load Windows from the NAND media? Why, there won’t be anything left for applications and user data!

As it turns out, one doesn’t need to cache all of an application or OS into NAND in order to greatly accelerate its loading. Only a minority of such files need to reside in flash to achieve significant boot-up acceleration. The rest only load from magnetic media if and when needed later in the use cycle.