Seagate Announces First Hybrid Hard Drive

writertype writes "Today, Seagate announced about a dozen new products, including its first hybrid laptop hard drive that includes a 256-Mbyte flash chip to save power and speed up the time a notebook recovers from hibernation. Interestingly, the new Momentus 5400 PSD has also exceeded earlier estimates of hybrid hard-drive performance, which said that such drives would add an extra hour to the typical battery life of a notebook PC."

Comments

Re:Death of Harddrives?

[flooey]

Given the rapid pace of development of flash memory, how long until hard drives are gone altogether? It would seem the breakout of flash memory in the marketplace is bringing us one step closer to relaible instant-on systems, with none of the tedious waiting for drives to spin up.

I'd imagine that hard drives will go away only once they find something akin to flash that isn't limited in the number of writes. Having a limit of a million writes is completely reasonable for iPods, cameras, and other devices where you do infrequent large writes. Having /tmp, home directories, or so forth on flash memory could burn it out pretty fast, though.

Having a flash device for the OS and programs and a hard drive for general purpose storage, though, that I could see being feasible in not too long.

Probably a good while yet

[Sycraft-fu]

Flash is getting better at an amazing rate but it's got a looooong way to go to catch HDs. You need more capacity, much less cost, and also higher speeds. While flash has faster random access, it can't hit the sustained transfer rates of HDs, at least not the normal flash RAM you find for sale everywhere.

I imagine the hybrid HDs will be the first step. Try and get the best of both worlds. A small flash store for frequently accessed thigns to get lightning fast random access, a large magnetic disk so you don't compramise on storage. Windows Vista is apparantly going to be pushing this rather hard. MS notes support for it as one of the features, and even if you lack a hybrid HD, you can get something similar by giving it a USB flash drive and instructiong Vista to use it as an app cache. Parts of programs are then put on the flash to speed load times.

I think that's the kind of thing we'l see for a number of years here until flash gets cheaper.

Re:Will it work?

[LnxAddct]

That is kind of like saying L2 cache is pointless because you can't fit 4 gigs of memory into it. Used wisely, this 256MB could be very useful.
Regards,
Steve

Re:Death of Harddrives?

[Surt]

Some flash is up to about 3 million writes already. At 10 million writes the problem is effectively solved, they'll be able to warranty their flash for continuous writes for about 5 years at that point, matching the warranty on your hard drive.

The write limit is not going to be the barrier to replacing hard drives for nearly as long as price and size are going to be.