Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

4 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 chrylis · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I'm not sure exactly which market Seagate are aiming for here.

      *raises hand*

      I put one of the 750GB XT's in my laptop and have been thoroughly pleased with it. It's nice to talk about having one SSD for caching and then platters for big storage of everything else, but the point of the hybrid drives is that you don't have to split up your partitions and manually allocate data between the two. A device-mapper target could theoretically do the same thing, but I'm only aware of one quite new third-party driver for Windows that attempts this sort of mapping, and in the meantime, I'm satisfied with near-instant application launches from my XT without having to touch a thing.

    2. 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.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
  2. Brilliant! by stevenfuzz · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?