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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."
Hybrid storage drives should be manually manageable.
You should have the possibility of configuring which files/folders/partitions/whatever you want to be accessed fast and which parts are to be left as "long term", slow access, storage.
It wouldn't help start up time would it ?
New things are always on the horizon
The main thing I use swap for these days is hibernating my laptop. What I need is persistent storage - the quicker the better.
SSD wont be as cheap per GB as traditional drives for many years to come. Chances are that even when a 500 GB SSD drive gets to an acceptable price point, an old-fashioned hard drive would still be cheaper and hold many, many more data at the same time.
This solution provides a cost-effective way to have both performance and storage *right now*.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
The way to get both performance and storage right now is to by TWO disks. An amazing concept I know. Who would have thought it was possible to get more then one HD/SSD into a PC.
Every single story about SSD's seems to bring out the idiots who want everything on one disk. Good thing these guys ain't farmers or they would be trying to plow the field with a Ferrari or cruise town with a tractor.
This drive is only of use to people who can't afford a real SSD and are limited to a laptop with only one drive bay and even then you would get far better performance with a normal SSD and an external drive for your porn collection.
Yes yes, there are people who use a laptop AND have need for far bigger datasets but on the whole, those people also need far greater access speeds then a traditional laptop HD can offer. I find it amazing to see someone claim he needs to edit video on a laptop with a 500gb 2.5 inch HD running at 5400 rpm. Who are you trying to kid?
And this drive won't be much help here. 4GB is just a cache file, if you are lucky it caches the right files but if you are doing complex stuff these "smart" caches often get horribly confused and start caching the wrong data. Like Vista trying to cache torrented files. Yes, I know it accesses the file a lot but please don't try and cache a 10gb file on the same HD. What's the fucking point? If you for instance will be running a large database from this drive, I am willing to bet its cache performance will degrade as it simply has to much to cache. Small caches only work when a small amount of files is requested a lot and the rest isn't. Like a porn collecton on your OS drive. Video editing, databases, filesharing always screw up caches.
If you really want performance in a laptop, spring for one with two drive bays, put as much memory in it as it can hold and get an SSD and a HD. A real SSD not one of the cheap ones some laptop companies put inside. An SSD is NOT just a fast HD, they truly are in a class of their own. And even if you got only a small single SSD, then you can still save space by putting your music/porn on a flash card or usb stick instead.
I wonder if people can ever get it into their heads that an SSD is about speed, not about capacity. Then again, since every single netbook these days comes with a 360gb slow ass HD instead of small but fast SSD, I think I might be fighting a loosing battle. Seems the average customer can only judge something if the number is bigger.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This drive still suffers from the historical bugaboo of spinning platters: it is damaged by shock. Also, it has the power draw (and heat output) of other spinning media.
Those are the two biggest reasons for SSD, especially in notebooks. Performance improvements are a factor, but I think they're the least interesting. In this respect, Seagate still needs to bring an answer, and they need to do it fast to justify their run up in stock price.
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$tar -xvf
Solid state drives are flash-based and may never have the price:GB ratio that mechanical drives have. Methinks that even when 1TB SSDs become relatively cheap, mechanical HDDs will still reign in price and long-term reliability for heavy data usage. The deal with this hybrid product is that it combines both technologies to get the best of both worlds today. 4GB of flash is cheap, and obviously, so are mechanical drives. Combine them to get similar performance to a SSD and reliability of an HDD.
What makes this special is not just that it has a cache. Every HDD out there has a cache. This puppy has a "cache" 100x what current drives have. What's more is that this cache is persistent/nonvolatile. It's good when you reboot, so even at OS load, you see the advantages.
You're forgetting one thing:
Sometimes, a machine will go from seemingly normal to suddenly thrashing about in swap rather heavily, with no warning at all. This has been the bulk of my experience, anyway. When your machine gets to that point, and you're in a graphical environment like the majority of desktop users are, you may not be *able* to look into the problem at all. You have to wait until after the damn thing comes to its senses, because you can't even switch to a regular text console, let alone log in in from another box. Forget trying to spawn a terminal. Every little program you launch to try to find the cause just causes the machine to use more memory or swap at this point, which just compounds the problem.
When the offending program finally does end, it's too late to see what went wrong because most programs leave no traces of their actions other than doing whatever they're programmed to do. Unless you're running some kind of process/resource logging program on your box (I'm not aware of anyone who does this outside of security professionals perhaps), good luck finding out what actually caused the problem, unless you saw something visibly bug out just before the machine stopped responding.
There are no two ways about it - this is absolutely the worst way to handle an out-of-memory condition. Most people would much rather have programs complain about lack of memory than to have their machine "lock up" for an hour while sitting there churning away in swap. In my experience, the average user figures their computer's being stupid again, and it's time to hit the power switch or the reset button, or maybe call someone for help (which doesn't work anyway, so they're back to square one).
To give an example, I once set my machine off to run a build which should have taken maybe half an hour, and went off to run some errands and watch a movie. It was still going three hours later, and had dug the machine so deep into swap that mouse events were taking 10-20 seconds just to echo to the screen, and keyboard events were nonexistent as far as X was concerned. I tried my level best to bring the machine back to a sane state, but I eventually had to give up and hit it with Alt-SysRq-U/S/B.
I love Linux as much as anyone, but I got sick and tired of this happening on my boxes, and responded the only way that seemed to make sense: I disabled swap entirely on both systems and added enough RAM to each to make up for the lost "memory".
Aside from older hardware that clearly needs it because of sheer lack of RAM, is there even any reason to recommend/enable swap by default anymore? Modern machines come standard with around 4GB of insanely fast RAM - isn't that enough?