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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."
I wonder if this is simply a more expensive version of ReadyBoost. Similarly, it takes your most frequently used files and puts them on a flash drive for faster access times, in a way that is transparent to the end user. In this case I wonder if there would be any speed gain from using this on a PC running Windows 7 with ReadyBoost? Caching always introduces some overhead, so rather than using multiple levels of "flash cache" it might be better to simply turn ReadyBoost off in that case. My experience with ReadyBoost has been that it does indeed improve performance, but in no way close to using a real SSD as the system drive.
Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
Seems like you could do better if you simply could reorder the files on your traditional hard disk so that you'd get 100% readahead buffer hits. If properly optimized this way, your traditional hard disk should always be transferring near the max block read rate of ~100MB/s
I'm guessing this is what some of the boot profilers / optimizers are doing.
The readahead utility used by Redhat / Fedora (and also available for Debian) gives you some benefit loading lots of small files from the disk by reordering reads by inode number to minimize head seeks. The next major benefit would be if it could actually reorganize all those files into a single tarfile, and maybe even compress it a bit, so it can do a single large block read to get all that content off of disk and into RAM cache.
What if this drive could show up as two devices and a control driver and the driver allows a very fast copy between the two (without using SATA to the mobo)? SCSI has control drivers, used for scanners, tape libraries, etc. It wouldn't be to hard to graft a few controls into this drive and then have out of band front-line to nearline migration that happens on the disk autonomously.
Cool! Amazing Toys.