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Hybrid Drives Struggling In Face of SSDs
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."
Suppliers, competing for my money.... (weeps) :-)
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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.
You can keep your shitty caching schemes and your hybrid drives (which are just shitty caching schemes in a black box).
SSDs all the way. If I need bigbadstorage, I buy multiple SSDs.
The only problem I have with SSDs is the inability to securely erase shit without blanking the entire drive.
Yeah, it costs more, but I get assloads of performance and power savings out of it.
I just wish someone would make 3.5" drives besides OCZ. Hell - I wish someone would make 5.25" drives.
Poor Seagate "will double in sales from 1 million to 2 million units this year."... With that kind of tortoise slow 100% growth they must be so sad. Poor poor sad seagate. Seriously, I do not understand this article or what point it makes. Obviously if ONE company is selling a fairly new product in a sea of solid state drives, they are not going to immediately overtake the old technology, and I'm not sure how doing so is the only way to measure their success. Am I crazy here? Was this posted by a bored robot?
Then it wouldn't matter how fast or slow the hard drive is, because there'd be no need for treating it like memory.
As for SSDs, I think they are too costly. A disk drive at 2 terabytes costs around $130. The same in an solid-state drive would be thousands of dollars.
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I currently have a 750GB HD and 60GB SSD in my middle-aged Macbook Pro, which is doing fantastic, but with the recently low price of the 512GB Crucial M4 [1] which is now $.80/GB, I can ditch the spinning rust, archive some media to my large-ish NAS (this is not that painful even with large files using a dual-band N router), and be completely silent.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004W2JL3Y/ref=s9_simh_gw_p147_d2_g147_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-3&pf_rd_r=1ZFFKPT8NRYNA8KW97AW&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938811&pf_rd_i=507846
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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).
SSDs and hard drives fail in different ways, so it doesn't make much sense to me to combine them into one physical unit. Having both in one system does make a lot of sense, however, and making intelligent use of them isn't all that hard.
Put your OS and basically all applications on the SSD. RAM is cheap, so unless you're doing something unusual you should not be hitting the SSD for swap. Documents and other small but important data can go on the SSD as well. Larger media, like movies, music, and large photo collections, go on the hard drive. The hard drive can act as the first backup for the SSD as well (but not the only backup, of course). I get that companies like Seagate want to have software figure out an optimal mix of where to store data based on usage, but I'm not sure that's such a huge advantage. SSD lifespan can be extended by reducing writes, and storing mostly applications there can really cut down on those, versus using it as a large cache.
On a desktop, having these as separate physical devices is straightforward and very useful. If one starts to die (likely the hard drive), it can be replaced without affecting the other. An added bonus is that either the SSD or the HD could be upgraded separately as you need or as components become cheaper.
On a laptop, things are trickier. Most modern laptops only have one hard drive slot, but it wouldn't be hard to keep a traditional hard drive slot and include, say, 64 GB of SSD on a small chip. Apple does this with most of their Macbook line now; an unfortunate side effect is that proprietary sizing or connectors make third party replacement more difficult, but there's no reason that your standard non-Apple companies have to go that way. There are already several SSDs in the 1.8" form factor, which should be reasonable to fit alongside the standard 2.5" hard drive form factor. A setup like this would be much better than a hybrid disk with a measly 4GB of flash; you're better off making greater use of suspend on your laptop and spending a little more to bump up your RAM.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
"more manufacturers will need to produce them" ? Somehow I doubt that's going to make much of a difference, given that we're down to just three companies in the world that manufacture spinning platter HDD's at all at this point in time: Western Digital, Seagate, and Toshiba.
In the recent past, Hitachi's HDD division was bought by Western Digital, and Samsung's HDD branch was bought by Seagate.
On top of that, Toshiba only makes 2.5" drives, which means Seagate only has one competitor left in the 3.5" market.
SSD's are not going to be that great for a LONG time, for those that need large amounts of storage.
I have been doing a lot of digital photography for a while - I have three 2TB drives for RAW files, and one 3TB drive for a photo library.
Not to mention I REALLY have 3x that, so I can maintain a mirror and an offsite backup.
If nothing else large drives still make tons of sense for backup, so Seagate cornering the market on better forms of what are inherently secondary drives seems like an intelligent move.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Large main memory so there's always plenty of memory free, decent sized SSD as a cache, caching SW, and a HD RAID subsystem at the backend. That's how we've been doing it on big iron for years. Now if a hybrid HD had a couple 100GB SSD and a few GB of RAM we could talk. Otherwise your hit rate is just too low.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html
To quote the above:
Thing is, SSDs are so scorching hot that I'm willing to put up with their craziness.
hybrids have had their time. The mass market wants SSD in their device and access to large cap HDs either via a cloud or networked RAID/storage. It makes sense because the average buyer either has multiple devices is often part of a work/family group that shares data and apps. Although it's nice to carry around a device with big storage, most of may storage is elsewhere and I'm happy with that.
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>>>Speed up the SLOWEST part of a personal computer or server, which traditionally IS harddisks?
Eliminate the need to use the hard disk like pretend RAM and it doesn't matter if your HDD is slow as snails, because your computer will be doing all its work out of memory. (Ya know, like computers used to do back before HDDs were commonplace.) The ideal would be 0KB of pagefile on the HDD, and working completely out of DRAM.
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Or it could be that sporty conversions of standard sedans don't sell as well as actual sports cars. There's nothing a sporty sedan is good for that you can't do just as well with a sports car.
Or maybe, these are different products aimed at different markets?
It will still need data from the hard disk, which is where you will still get slowdowns during boot, and on opening every new application and file...
I still don't understand the whole performance thing. I can stream DVD quality video and write to my current HD's at the same time. Why would I possibly need to go faster than that? Besides... I like the massive storage that's so cheap now!
I don't respond to AC's.
I looked seriously at hybrid discs around a year ago, and basically ignored them when I found that they only use the NAND portion for read caching, not write acceleration... With the exception of the initial boot, which I'm not that interested in since I suspend and usually only boot my laptop once a month, it seems like you're better off adding 4GB of RAM to your box rather than using a hybrid drive. At least for my rare reboot case.
So far the failure numbers for SSDs are pretty scary. I've been able to recovery data from plenty of drives before they totally failed but when an SSD decides to fail you're basically fucked.
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To win a competition at Supercomputing several years ago, to save power and enhance I/O speed we had an entire cluster running off a very lage ram disk on the headnode exported over IP over IB on QDR Infiniband to all our compute nodes. Since we couldn't use battery backup and couldn't back things up to the one hard drive in the cluster (the head node's boot drive) particularly often (and certainly not in the middle of data crunching, we did save results back to disk eventually) I spent the whole competition biting my nails (way back in 07 we actually had a power outage).
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
I upgraded my laptop with an SSD and I'd never go back to a conventional hard drive. The speed increase is immense. Prices seem to be coming down as well so the hybrid drive is probably painted itself into a corner.
The technical argument for combining flash and spinning media in a single package is weak to nonexistent. It is far better to have the devices at different levels in the storage hierarchy separate and fully under control of the OS and applications, and have both devices be cheaper. The use case for spinning media in portable devices is vanishing fast and increasingly you will only see spinning media in online archive setups and huge databases. There is no advantage whatsoever to combining flash and spinning media in those setups, and only disadvantages like mismatched media lifetime.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Yes, like holding more data.
The fact that I found out - the hard way - that Seagate's warranty starts when their product(s) leave the factory - NOT when you actually purchase is. I purchased a Seagate drive, which failed two years later, and I attempted to call upon the "Five Year Warranty" - but oh, apparently NewEgg had said drive sitting on their shelves for three years (NOT knocking NewEgg - I love NewEgg and will for many more decades) - but Seagate considers THEIR warranty to start when it walks out the door, as opposed to when it was purchased. BOYCOTT Seagate, until they stop this silly warranty concept - it's the only major manufacturer that I know of that considers their warranty to start when their product leaves the factory, as opposed to when it is SOLD....
Given the choice between a single 500gb SSD and 2x 750gb hybrid drives, guess what I'll be taking. SSD is still too expensive for the capacity for some people - and for the price or less you can have "almost as fast" with fault tolerance.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
How do you think data gets into and out of ram Einstein?
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
The reason for hybrid drives is that operating systems didn't know how to take advantage of flash memory as an intermediate speed stable storage, compared to low-speed disks or fast volatile RAM. But they're starting to know how to do that, using techniques such as Windows ReadyBoost, or using the flash for paging, or putting commonly used files on the flash, or whatever. So there's a market window we're getting toward the end of.
Laptops don't always have room for a second disk-shaped drive, but that doesn't mean they don't have room for a flash memory device. Many laptops have slots for flash memory cards (typically SD or compact flash), and these days you can get USB memory sticks that aren't significantly bigger than the USB plug itself, so you can leave them in full-time. They're also starting to make PCI Express format flash drives.
Bill Stewart
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Hybrid Drivers Struggling In Face of STD"S
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
I just built a system with an Asus p9x79 pro mobo
Interesting feature: two of the 6gig sata connectors can be combined under one controller where one goes to a ssd cache and the other hd storage
So you can roll your own solution of ssd speed/ hd capacity
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had to uninstall/reinstall SQL 2008 on a client's PC last week. Took 5 minutes instead of 45. The only trouble with SSDs is they die quickly from repeated read/writes. A swap heavy OS like Win7 will kill one in no time. I guess you could use ram drives, but in the XP days that was bad juju. Maybe it's different for Win7 though.
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Once they start shrinking so much that they get too much recalls and a bad reputation, they will use part of the real estate on the die for parity and CRC checking. Sure, it will get worse first, but they'll sort it out once the competition starts forcing them to do so.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Actually, one function that the magnetic media does well that flash doesn't is when used as virtual memory. Flash memory has an endurance associated w/ every sector or block, and so are totally unsuitable for use as virtual memory. That's never been a problem w/ magnetic media.
The only way I see SSDs being vindicated is if the amount of RAM available makes the use of virtual memory totally unnecessary, but has that ever really been the case?
On Macs, the answer is obvious: Fairies!
A device which combines BOTH features of two standalone devices is doing WORSE than the combination of those standalone devices even though its cheaper and has the same performance. That's great.
They give you tiny increments of performance for massive price increases and they keep you locked in with poor one-off form factors. Whereas if they just abandoned spinning disk drives and built only SSDs for laptops and desktops they could make them absurdly cheap and fast in a very short time. But of course no one's going to do that because then consumers would actually be happy for a change.
I like the idea of increasing desktop performance with an SSD to cache the HD; you are basically buying performance, but not risking your data (SSD still has to prove itself to me)
Here is a good performance comparison article: http://www.techspot.com/review/515-crucial-adrenaline-ssd/
Boot times are irrelevant for a lot of people. Doesn't matter how slow the drive is, I can still boot my PC in the time it takes to make a cup of coffee - arrive at work, switch on, go for a coffee, PC's up and waiting when I get back. Same with opening applications - it's not something I do often, so time isn't critical.
It's like optimising code - make the optimisation where it makes most difference, not in infrequently used parts of the application
Even data read/writes aren't often critical. If I'm editing photos, the time is spent with the image in RAM. The time spent reading it from disk and writing back when I'm done is tiny in comparison. I'd say for most desktop/laptop users faster drives would be nice but not worth-spending-more nice. Obviously different with server applications.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
The only way I see SSDs being vindicated is if the amount of RAM available makes the use of virtual memory totally unnecessary, but has that ever really been the case?
I have 8GB RAM in my Linux system which cost maybe two hundred bucks in four DIMMs (lifetime warranty, fast timings, nice spreaders) and I have disabled swap entirely. I do not even think about my memory use and I run a WinXP VM with 2GB pretty much all the time in addition to opening lots and lots of programs and tabs and running Unity. In practice the average user can probably have 4GB (they're not even running a VM) and disable swap entirely. I've done this with 2GB on XP as well without issue.
Nine times out of ten if you're swapping you're in a world of shit anyway, and instead of stuff just dying because you're out of memory now, you get to swap for a while before processes start kicking the bucket.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
For all the pissing and moaning about failures: Drives fail. That's why you have backups and RAID.
Spinning drives only give advance warning about half the time. SSDs usually fail to read-only mode.
failure rates on spinning media have been increasing for the entire decade. That's what's driving manufacturrer consolidation (and always has done - makers who don't produce reliable drives get bought out by those who do)
Tb-class spinning drives have appalling failure rates. (15% in the case of my Samsung 2Tb drives, but I still keep buying 'em - they're cheap and I don't lose data), but that's why RAID was invented.... Tb class drives are cheap enough that a 12-drive raid6 aray (or Raidz3 if you use ZFS) costs less than the sas expander you'll need to drive the things.
SSD falure rates are declining
Cheap MLC SSDs aren't designed to be pounded on. - In the same way that a Geo Metro isn't going to survive long if you take it on the paris-dakar rally. Stay within the design parameters and things will be fine.
Expensive SLC SSDs are virtually indestructable. I have a Raid0 array of 5 X25Es that on average has 4Tb/day pass through it (backup spooling). 4 years on, none of those drives have skipped a beat or show any wigns of serious wear - but I've had to replace 4 (out of 12) "enterprise SATA" 250Gb spinning drives in the raid6 array that handles the database those SSDs depend on.
If you need lots of storage, don't do it on a windows box. There's a lot of pain and suffering along that path.
If your machine is swapping, then you're in trouble. Add more ram or cut down on processes. Swapspace is an emergency fallback. As soon as you hit swap you're only as fast as your hard drive - and that's firmly back in IBM XT territory, whether it's SSD or Spinning media.
Toms hardware and other sites have done extensive tests of these hybrid drives with a very mixed bag of results. Usually they are still an order of magnitude slower than SSDs, and only achieve their near-SSD perf after it's been 'trained' for a while on the data.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/momentus-xt-750gb-review,3223.html
And for all the complaining on here about SSD failure rates, wouldn't the lifetime of the solid-state memory units in a hybrid drive be even worse because it's a much smaller block of memory and therefore must swap much more data in/out of the total capacity? What's the point of a hybrid drive if the caching part is likely to fail much faster than the SSD equivalent?
I finally made the jump to buying an SDD and have a 180gb Intel one coming from Amazon's super-sale last week. I'll be installing my OS on it and using the procedure that many others have used with great success. Maybe you can find some real solutions to some of your counter-arguments there:
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/70822-ssd-tweaks-optimizations-windows-7-a.html
After having my work laptop with one, I simply am amazed at how much more real-life usable my machine is. Waking from sleep is near instantaneous and I know longer wonder if it's worth it to wake my machine and wait 20 seconds to check something out before walking out the door. Batter life is nearly doubled. I don't hear clicks as the drive parks itself every time it gets a chance. I don't have to worry about josteling or even *dropping* the laptop while it's on. It's honestly the most amazing upgrade to PC technology and usability I've seen in years. Beats any graphics card upgrade since first going to VGA and proc upgrade since the original Pentium.
Sure, it's life might be shorter; but I've been watching my hard drives have shorter and shorter lives too. Warranties are no longer 5 years, they're 2 if you get that. Out of 5 seagates I've owned in the last few years, 3 of the 5 have died. One of the replacements even died. I switched to hitatchi's and have done better. So, and SSD won't make any different to the regular backups I do now anyway.
We tech nerds often forget it's about the usability stupid. Usability as your mom and girlfriend see it. I.e. - you turn it on and it works. You don't see all kinds of cryptic mysterious stuff happening, or cross your fingers and hope something works. You press the button on the appliance and the toast comes out. Until we really grock that - these arguments are pedantic to non-techs who are just as likely to toss an old computer or give it to the kid because it's getting slow or the drive dies in it.
If you used the full disk encryption available in all modern OS, you wouldn't have to worry about erasing confidential files, and erasing the whole "disk" is easy: just forget the key.
-merv
I run administrator/root with no password and leave everything except my tax return backups wide open.
Anything else is done on an ad hoc basis.