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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.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
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
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
That's a myth. Maybe it was true for some old SSDs. But it hasn't even been that true for normal usb drives.
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?83778-Time-warp-drive-vanishing-after-3-days-data-gone-on-reboot-I-need-3-to-5-users-with-this-issue-to-help
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?78706-OCZ-Vertex2-180GB-lost-all-Data-after-3-Days
http://www.techspot.com/news/44694-intel-confirms-8mb-bug-in-320-series-ssds-fix-available.html
You may say those failures are due to bugs, but when there are so many bugs, they are effectively the main failure cause of SSDs, not "wear and tear": http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2011/09/01/ssd-users-report-widespread-data-loss/1
And when the SSD return rates are often even higher than "spinning disk" drives you should be very careful which SSDs you use (so far I think Samsung is OK).
http://www.behardware.com/articles/843-7/components-returns-rates-5.html
http://www.behardware.com/articles/831-7/components-returns-rates.html
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.
No. Typical SSDs these days are designed to tolerate even the heavy R/W of Windows just fine. Of course there's still crappy and unstable models on the market, but swapping shouldn't be a concern.
On Macs, the answer is obvious: Fairies!
I used a first-gen Intel x25-e as my only drive for several years, and when I finally retired it (because I bought larger and faster drives), it had barely scratched the surface of its lifespan. A modern SSD will last for years, or even decades, before it wears out.
Look at it this way: even with the reduced lifespan of high density NAND, you get something like 3000 writes out of them (used to be 10k for the 45nm stuff, but write amplification is below 1 these days due to compression). On a 180GB drive, that will get you a lifetime write count of 540 PB. To hit that writing 20GB of fresh data every single day (which is probably way more than what actually happens in practice, even with swapping, which is predominantly read-heavy, not write-heavy), the drive would last roughly 74 years...
Look at it this way: even with the reduced lifespan of high density NAND, you get something like 3000 writes out of them (used to be 10k for the 45nm stuff, but write amplification is below 1 these days due to compression). On a 180GB drive, that will get you a lifetime write count of 540 PB. To hit that writing 20GB of fresh data every single day (which is probably way more than what actually happens in practice, even with swapping, which is predominantly read-heavy, not write-heavy), the drive would last roughly 74 years...
Except 3000*180GB is 540TB, not PB. And I'd be very careful to equate writes with data. Downloading a 20GB torrent for example will lead to >>20GB writes as it writes data blocks and the SSD has to rewrite its physical blocks. A lot of apps write log files where one line = rewriting a block. I used an SSD very heavily and despite the 10k writes/cell rating it was worn out in 1,5 years, right now the health check on my replacement drive that I feel I've been treating nicely is already down to 64% in health after a little over a year. At this rate it'll only be good for another two years. This is with swap disabled, torrents downloaded to a regular 3.5" HDD but it runs 24/7 though.
I used a first-gen Intel x25-e as my only drive for several years
If you wrote that accurately you used an enterprise SSD using SLC cells good for 100k writes or so. For sure, if I say my 5k writes MLC will last me 3 years then a 100k drive would last me 60 years but your experience with that is pretty much entirely irrelevant to the current consumer market. A ten year old HDD can still be usable, I can pretty much guarantee a ten year old SSD in active use will not. I've accepted it due to the huge usability performance, but SSDs are very much consumables right now, if you can't afford to replace them regularly you shouldn't buy them.
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