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Seagate Announces First Hybrid Hard Drive

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the closer-to-instant-gratification dept.

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."

8 of 243 comments (clear)

  1. Yes, but how many LOC? by hoggoth · · Score: 5, Funny

    > 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!

    --
    - For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat /dev/random (may take some time)
  2. Old objects of lust by also-rr · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    --
    Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
  3. Re:Will it work? by FireFury03 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

    --
    http://blog.nexusuk.org
  4. Re:Mbytes? by OneoFamillion · · Score: 5, Funny
    > 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.

  5. Re:Will it work? by LnxAddct · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

  6. Re:Death of Harddrives? by Surt · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
  7. How to do this with Linux by WhiteWolf666 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
  8. Here's the math... by codemaster2b · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    And over there we have the labyrinth guards. One always lies, one always tells the truth, and one stabs people who ask t