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Hybrid Drives Struggling In Face of SSDs

Posted by timothy on from the great-enemy-of-the-good dept.

Lucas123 writes "New numbers show hybrid drives, which combine NAND flash with spinning disk, will double in sales from 1 million to 2 million units this year. Unfortunately for Seagate — the only manufacturer of hybrids — solid-state drive sales are expected to hit 18 million units this year and 69 million by 2016. Low-capacity, cache SSDs, which typically have 20GB to 40GB of capacity and run along side hard drives in notebooks and desktops, will see their shipments rise even more this year to 23.9 million units, up by an astounding 2,660% from just 864,000 units in 2011. Shipments will then jump to 67.7 million units next year, cross the hundred-million-unit mark in 2015, and hit 163 million units by 2016, according to IHS iSuppli. If hybrid drives are to have a chance at surviving, more manufacturers will need to produce them, and they'll need to come in thinner form factors to fit today's ultrabook laptops."

7 of 256 comments (clear)

  1. Unfortunately for Seagate? by DragonWriter · · Score: 5, Insightful

    New numbers show hybrid drives, which combine NAND flash with spinning disk, will double in sales from 1 million to 2 million units this year. Unfortunately for Seagate â" the only manufacturer of hybrids â" solid-state drive sales are expected to hit 18 million units this year and 69 million by 2016.

    How is this unfortunate for Seagate? Sure, more pure SSDs are being sold than hybrids, but there is more competition in that market, whereas hybrids are a market Seagate completely owns that is expecting 100% year-to-year growth. Seems to me, there is no bad news for Seagate in that.

    1. Re:Unfortunately for Seagate? by Galestar · · Score: 4, Insightful

      +1 to parent. -1 to story. I think I've just about had it with the patently false summaries and articles from slashdot. Peace out.

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      AccountKiller
    2. Re:Unfortunately for Seagate? by Darinbob · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Because some people think that not being number one is the same as being a loser.

    3. Re:Unfortunately for Seagate? by hairyfeet · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Because so far nobody has been able to do shit about the crazy failure rates when it comes to SSDs and as they all become MLC and continue to have process shrinks those numbers are simply gonna get worse?

      And before anybody posts that Google study please don't bother, I'd argue what Google sees is pretty fucking far from what a normal person sees when it comes to use. And what I've seen is unless you drop the things HDDs generally (not 100%, but I'd say 85%+) give you some warning before they shit themselves and die, usually enough to get your data off. that has NOT been my experience with SSDs, which just die. No warning, no errors to give you a heads up, no SMART, just flip the switch and all your stuff is gone.

      That is why I tell my customers IF you are only using the SSD for the OS AND you have pretty damned regular backups of said OS? Then please go for an SSD. the nice thing about the hybrids is the entire SSD portion can die tomorrow and you STILL have a fully functional drive with NO lost data, as everything on the SSD is also backed up to the HDD. But until they can fix the problem with the crazy failure rate, which i bet is gonna get a hell of a lot worse as the chips keep shrinking, then its gonna be a gamble that I bet a lot of people after their first failure won't make again.

      The numbers I'd really like to see is how many that switched to SSDs had a failure of the drive and how many chose to stay with SSDs after the failure. Because I bet a lot of people weren't too happy the first time they got told "All your stuff is gone" and i'd love to see how many preferred to continue the risk after failure.

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      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    4. Re:Unfortunately for Seagate? by Klinky · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If anecdotal evidence on SSDs scares you perhaps you should re-review Google's hard data on hard disk failures. Certain brands of SSDs are already many times more reliable than hard drives if looking at failure rates over time. Hard drives are no more reliable. You will find plenty of anecdotes in NewEgg reviews of people buying x number of hard drives and y number of them arriving DOA or dying in 3 months.

      http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/en/us/archive/disk_failures.pdf

      http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923-6.html

  2. Re:No Thanks by QuasiSteve · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Hell, you can keep your 5.25" drives. Wake me when they bring back 8" drives. And what's this Flash nonsense? Get me a direct connection and DDR3 RAM backed up by a battery instead. Solves the whole 'securely erase' thing, too. Yeah, it costs more, but... etc.

  3. I don't understand why HDD makers don't do it by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 3, Insightful

    We love those little Seagate drives at work, put them in laptops all over. They are a great way to get plenty of storage for not too much money and still have decent performance. No they don't compare to real SSDs, but neither does the price.

    Heck I use SSDs and I still have one. My new laptop has a 256GB SSD for the OS and apps drive, and a 750GB Seagate HHDD for data. Reason is those suckers perform like desktop harddrives. I'll spend the bit extra for the cache to have good performance, but it isn't feasible for me to go all SSD, just too much money (I play with audio that involved a few hundred GB of samples).