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Seagate Launches Hybrid SSD Hard Drive
MojoKid writes "Though there has been some noise in recent years about hybrid storage, it really hasn't made a significant impact on in the market. Seagate is taking another stab at the technology and launched the Momentus XT 2.5-inch hard drive that mates 4GB of flash storage with traditional spinning media in an attempt to bridge the gap between hard drives and SSDs. Seagate claims the Momentus XT can offer the same kind of enhanced user experience as an SSD, but with the capacity and cost of a traditional hard drive. That's a pretty tall order, but the numbers look promising, at least compared to current traditional notebook hard drives."
The cache is 4GB, the drive is up to a 500 GB 'traditional' drive.
What swapfile? I have used Ubuntu on a few PCs with at least half a GB of RAM, and I rarely see swap usage climb above 40 MB. In an environment where reads are cheaper than writes, you'll want to use a low value for the swappiness, such as 10% instead of the default 60%.
These days with RAM being so cheap, your swap space is basically a warning that things are going terribly wrong. You want your swap on slow storage because slow storage is cheap and your swap should see very few writes under normal operation. If your machine starts hitting swap like crazy, you'll know immediately because your performance will go straight down the crapper as it feverishly tries to write to slow storage. This is your cue to figure out what's wrong and fix it ASAP so your machine will stop thrashing.
According to the article, it's SLC flash. It should have many more write-erase cycles than MLC.
The difference between this drive and every other drive on the markt is not the fact it has a cache. Every harddisk has a cache. The difference is: this drive has a 4 GB cache. And because it's an SSD cache and not (as you suggest) a RAM cache, it maintains it's state even between reboots, so your computer is fast right from the start.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
No, because then every time your computer reboots, you need to fill the cache again. Using a solid state cache, you need to fill the cache only once and then keep it updated according to your usage, but a reboot wont harm performance at all.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Microsoft actually did pitch "ReadyDrive" hybrid SSDs as a selling point for Vista back when it launched. It was basically the same as this, except the caching was controlled in the OS and not the drive and it did some fancier stuff like caching boot data on shutdown. It didn't do very well, perhaps because the technology wasn't mature enough in price and speed.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
They haven't been omitted. You need to read the second link. IOPs and read/write speeds are about 1/3 and 2/3 of the way down the page, respectively.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Should it be "much" instead? I'm not a native English speaker, so if you could enlighten me on how to use the language correctly, I would be thankful.
"Much" would be correct. In general, "much" is used when speaking without reference to any kind of unit (e.g. oil, power, land, money, data, etc), while "many" is used when speaking with units (e.g. barrels, kilowatts, hectares, dollars, bytes).
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.