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

Tax deduction?

[Alex P Keaton in da]

Will these qualify me for a tax deduction?

Yes, but how many LOC?

[hoggoth]

> Seagate's pushbutton drive is capable of storing all of the following, combined: a 25-DVD movie collection, 15,000-song music collection, 15,00-photo image library, 50-hours worth of video, and 50 computer games, with 300GB left over

Bah, these measurements tell me nothing.
How many Libraries Of Congress can I store on this thing?! That's what I need to know!

Re:Yes, but how many LOC?

[Pantero Blanco]

Seriously. 15,000 songs in midi format, 15,000 50x50 photos, 50 hours of low-bitrate video, and 50 text adventures don't take up much space at all.

I always wonder how they're counting the "DVD movies"...Raw and untranscoded? Transcoded to a 700MB avi? A direct copy of the DVD to your hard drive?

Will it work?

[Umbral Blot]

Hibernation works by writing the contents of the RAM to the hard drive, so this would only work if you had = 256 MB RAM. I don't think too many new systems meet that requirement, and even less will after Vista comes out. Similarly if you want to save time on boot-up you would need to store all the necessary system files in that space, and few modern operating systems can cram themselves into that space.

Re:Will it work?

[ThisNukes4u]

But if you have 512mb of RAM, and even if only half of that is in the flash memory after hibernation, you're still saving ~ half the ammount of data that would otherwise have to be written and read from the disk, which is more likely than not a very substantial speedup and power savings versus no flash memory at all.

Re:Will it work?

[FireFury03]

When you hibernate, much of the stuff in memory can be dumped to the swap partition rather than to the "hibernate file". This means that on resume it can be swapped back in at a later time when it's actually needed rather than swapping it all in at once. So it's very likley that all the stuff that actually needs to be loaded immediately at resume time can fit into the flash memory.

What I want to know is what's the point in integrating the flash into the hard drive rather than just having it as an independent device that can be used how the software sees fit?

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

Any benefit to existing laptops?

[WoTG]

The PR blurb is a little light on the details. Does anyone know if there will be speed benefits (or, IMHO, less likely power benefits) for existing laptops? I.e. should I look forward to giving my laptop a bit of a boost with one of these drives? I know that Vista is supposed to have a lot of code to really benefit from hybrid drives... but I imagine that at least some benefits might be available to XP or Linux.

Does anyone smarter than me know more about these drives?

Old objects of lust

[also-rr]

This brings back a memory of a very, very, very long time ago when I was fortunate enough to get to touch a computer that had its root filesystem on a 250mb solid state disk, so that it only had to touch the much slower mechanical drives infrequently. For it's day the thing was a monster with speed that made my own systems seem inadequate in every way. So what did we do with all of that raw, untamed power? Played nethack.

Death of Harddrives?

[Billosaur]

The Momentus 5400 PSD is Seagate's first hybrid hard drive, incorporating 256 Mbytes of flash memory that serves as a fast cache for booting and saving data. When booting the PC, the operating system loads data from the flash memory first, speeding bootup times and negating the need to quickly spin up the drive, a power-consuming process.

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.

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.

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.

Re:What about maximum read/writes for flash?

[flooey]

don't some flash memories have limited read/writes far below platter hard drives? something like in the range of a couple thousand I thought... does this mean your hard drive will die even quicker, or will they make these drives eventually have removable and replacable flash cards, such as SD or something?

It's unlimited reads, but limited writes, so assuming you're using it to store OS code, the limited writes probably won't be a major problem. The limitation is usually in the low millions as well.

Flashy Mobiles

[Doc Ruby]

I've got an Dell notebook with only 10GB (IDE) HD. I'd love to replace it with Flash cards. They're about $45:2GB up to 4GB, in multiple formats. A bank of CF/SDIO/USB slots, or just an IDE/whatever adapter, plus the cards, would fit inside the current drive's slot. And offer much better power, weight and heat loads. With hotswappable filesystems, upgradeable in small chunks and pluggable into other devices, carryable in pockets.

I don't see how <20GB HDs have any place in the portable market anymore (outside of tiny niche multimedia producers), as even $35 80GB HDs are overkill for most people who network, as most everyone does. If every notebook, handheld, iPod, phone and other mobile device used Flash instead of HDs, Flash prices at that industry scale would drop, capacities would multiply, and $5:GB up to 32 or 64GB would be common. While much of the rest of the cost of the device would be lower without extreme measures to accommodate the hungry, inefficient HD.

Re:Mbytes?

[OneoFamillion]

> Are those 6 minute MegaAbs?

No, not six minutes, SEVEN! No one could get a good workout in just six minutes, duh!

Hmm... MegaBS = 1000^2 people bullshitted? Could come in handy with all these RIAA topics.

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.

drives are faster, too

[SuperBanana]

Hibernation works by writing the contents of the RAM to the hard drive, so this would only work if you had = 256 MB RAM. I don't think too many new systems meet that requirement, and even less will after Vista comes out

Not to mention your average notebook hard drive these days is fully capable of pushing 20+MB/sec for the linear read a "resume" requires, unless the hibernation file is fragmented. Even fairly expensive media like Sandisk Compact Flash "Extreme III" cards for digital cameras can't hit that, and one of those (1GB) costs about the same as a 100GB hard drive. Silly.

My Macbook by default hibernates, but I found a setting to flip that off so that it "sleeps" like it should (involve the 'defaults' command, I forget exactly.) Now it takes about 2 seconds to 'wake up'. Ironically enough, hibernation takes longer than it takes to boot (about 25-30 seconds) and the scale has probably been tipped even further in favor of "booting" with another GB of ram I just added; by my rough calculation it'd take well over a minute if most memory was in use at time of hybernation (maybe the OS clears out all disk cache before doing it- you'd hope so.)

Hibernation is for when your battery is pretty much dead and the laptop wakes up to hibernate before it looses the contents of RAM due to battery failure...and can people REALLY not wait the time it takes to boot or wake up from hibernation and copy the data back into RAM? Yeesh.

This seems like an attempt to save themselves in a market they're just not competitive in. From all accounts I've seen (and personal experience), Seagate's ATA-drive reliability is in the trashcan these days; the 7200.8 was a fiasco, and the 7200.9 doesn't seem much better. IBM sold off their drive business (which was a market leader in almost all segments) after the Deskstar/Deathstar fiasco, but Hitachi seems to be doing fabulously. I had a 7200.9 300GB drive that died within 12 hours of operation. It's been RMA'd, and the replacement will be sold on Craigslist or similar. In the meantime, a shiny new, cheaper, cooler-running, quieter Samsung Spinpoint is sitting in its place.

I think Seagate has seen the writing on the wall- hence the merger with Maxtor. I would imagine you'll see them merge Seagate/Maxtor technology in their ATA line and sell exclusively under Maxtor, and Seagate will go back to being a mostly SCSI brand, as their reputation there seems intact.

Re:lifetime of flash?

[fredistheking]

With defect management it shouldn't matter. There is no way the average number of writes per sector is going to get anywhere near the limit. If a particular sector is getting close, simply switch its address with one that isn't used very often.

Since Seagate is already defect managing the disk with their firmware, I don't see it being a big challange to have it defect manage the flash as well.

How to do this with Linux

[WhiteWolf666]

1. Acquire Flash memory. USB or whatever, it doesn't matter.
2. Insure you have the correct interface connections to the computer (USB port, USB cable, CF/SD drive, weird built-in hybrid device).
3. Boot Linux
4. Find location of Flash device. A modern distro will point this out to you on the desktop.
5. Use your GUI partitioner to define the flash device as your swap space. Be sure you purchased a flash device with size > system ram.
6. Suspend2Disk really, really fast.

Also, given a reasonably long up-time, enjoy the perks of a system with high-speed swap space. Applications, data, kernel; whatever! It all gets faster! Be sure to crank up your swappiness value for maximum effect; this'll have Linux swapping out just about everything it can get its hands on.

Given a modern flash device, with 1 million or so read/write cycles, and defect balancing, even under very high-usage you should get years of use.

Here's the math...

[codemaster2b]

These were their working definitions:
- 4 games/8GB or 2GB/game
- 8hrs video/8GB or 1GB/hr video
- 133 hrs music/8GB or 60MB/hr or 128kbit
- 2560 photos/8GB or 3.2MB/photo


Thus here is the math: - 750GB HDD - 300 GB left over
- 450 GB HDD = 15000 songs + 1500 photo + 50hrs video + 50 games + 25 DVDs
- 450 GB HDD = 60GB songs + 5GB photo + 50GB video + 100GB games + 25 DVDs
- 235 GB HDD = 25 DVDs
- 1 DVD = 9.4 GB

I guess they really mean it. Of course, the only way you're going to get a DVD onto your hard drive is through... um... antiquated software.