Is the Time Finally Right For Hybrid Hard Drives?

a_hanso writes "Hard drives that combine a traditional spinning platter for mass storage and solid state flash memory for frequently accessed data have always been an interesting concept. They may be slower than SSDs, but not by much, and they are a lot cheaper gigabyte-for-gigabyte. CNET's Harry McCracken speculates on how soon such drives may become mainstream: 'So why would the new Momentus be more of a mainstream hit than its predecessor? Seagate says that it's 70 percent faster than its earlier hybrid drive and three times quicker than a garden-variety, non-hybrid disk. Its benchmarks for cold boots and application launches show the new drive to be just a few seconds slower than a SSD. Or, in some cases, a few seconds faster. In the end, hybrid drives are compromises, neither as cheap as ordinary drives — you can get a conventional 750GB Momentus for about $150 — nor as fast and energy-efficient as SSDs.'"

Comments

Re:It'd better happen quick then

[drinkypoo]

That's because it doesn't do anything good for hard drives. There was a paper about it some years ago, I'm too lazy to google it up, but even 32 MB is too much (I think the sweet spot was around 2 MB).

Having had the 2MB and 8MB versions of the same disk from Seagate that uses the same mechanism and having seen the 8MB disk be substantially faster, I'm pretty sure it's not 2MB.