New Seagate Hybrid Drives Hampered By Slow Mechanical Guts

crookedvulture writes "Seagate announced its third-generation hybrid drives last month, revealing a full family of notebook and desktop drives that combine mechanical platters with solid-state storage. These so-called SSHDs are Seagate's first to be capable of caching write requests in addition to reads, and the mobile variants are already selling online. Unfortunately, a closer look at the Laptop Thin SSHD reveals some problems with Seagate's new design. While the integrated flash cache reduces OS and application load times by 30-45%, overall performance appears to be held back by its 5,400-RPM mechanical component. Seagate's last-gen Momentus XT hybrid spins its platters at 7,200-RPM, and it's faster than the new SSHD in a wide range of tests. The upcoming desktop SSHDs will also have 7,200-RPM spindle speeds, so they may prove more appealing than the mobile models."

Comments

Hey, Seagate:

[CanHasDIY]

2000 called, they want their crappy hardware back.

Re:Hey, Seagate:

[CanHasDIY]

Whoosh... or douche?

I'll let the reader be the judge.

Re:Hey, Seagate:

[Anonymous Coward]

There will always be crappy hardware as long as people keep paying for it.

Re:Hey, Seagate:

[Anonymous Coward]

He's just an obtuse fucking nerd that furthers the stereotype about computer-people.

Re:Hey, Seagate:

[girlintraining]

2000 called, they want their crappy hardware back.

Actually, this kind of thing has preceded every major storage advance in computers. As the replacement technology matures and becomes mainstream, the producers of the legacy technology cut corners on quality in order to maximize profit ahead of decommissioning of their production facilities for that technology. Zip disks, floppies, consumer tape drives, etc. All of these had major quality control issues near the end of their production runs. You would be hard-pressed to find a technology in this field that as it sunsets doesn't have its quality turn to absolute crap.

What Seagate is doing here is an attempt at prolonging that period to maximize profits on its existing (mechanical drive) production lines by gluing a turbo-charger onto the I/O equivalent of a four banger. They figure the consumers are idiots and will fall for four color marketing glossies saying these are the "fastest mechanical drives ever!" and boldly print the percentages all over the packaging... and then praying they don't look an aisle over and realize that a modest SSD would blow it out of the water for not much more cash. You can bet these drives are not built to the same specs or tolerances of previous models -- they will fail more often, and because of their hybrid nature, will be more difficult to recover data from when they do, if you can recover anything at all.

It's a douche move, but... it's sound business practice. Sell your customers down a river to keep profits up until you can turn up production on the Next Big Thing, and then try to buy them back later with discounts and deals.

Re:Hey, Seagate:

[wonkey_monkey]

1997 called. They want their "(Now - X years) called" joke back.

Re:Hey, Seagate:

[Anonymous Coward]

2000 called, they want their crappy hardware back.

2000 called? Did you warn them about Katrina? 9/11? No? You dick!

(Oblig. xkcd)

Re:Hey, Seagate:

[CanHasDIY]

1997 called. They want their "(Now - X years) called" joke back.

^
Just mad cuz you didn't think of it first :P

Re:Hey, Seagate:

[Jane Q. Public]

There was a discussion of this decision of Seagate's, back when it was announced. As much as I hate to say "I told you so"... I told you so. Going back to 5400 RPM was a bonehead move.

Re:Hey, Seagate:

[spire3661]

Their hybrid nature does not affect data recovery. All the onboard SSD does is cache data that exists on the HDD.

Re:Hey, Seagate:

[plover]

Certainly, technology producers change their designs as they go, making them cheaper and cheaper until they just barely stay within the lower end of their specs. It's called "optimization", and it's the responsible thing for a manufacturer to do for its shareholders. Same volume, same price, higher return on investment. If you don't personally like it, you can pay more for a device with better lower-end specs from someone else.

In the case of hard drives, Seagate knows that 5,400 RPM machines are far more reliable than 7,200 RPM machines, even after optimization of both. I suspect that in order to make 7,200 RPM drives more durable, the manufacturing costs exceeded that of SSDs. And if 7,200 RPM drives can't be made more reliable for an affordable price, I expect that is why Seagate is dropping them completely.

Hybrids are a way to sell a slightly faster version of the mechanical drive for people on a budget who still need reliability. No, it's not going to out-perform a 7,200 RPM drive, but over time it will do better than a 5,400 RPM drive without a cache. If you want performance, spend the extra money for a real SSD. If you want cheap speed without reliability, you'll have to buy a faster drive from someone else.

Re:Hey, Seagate:

[girlintraining]

It's called "optimization", and it's the responsible thing for a manufacturer to do for its shareholders. Same volume, same price, higher return on investment. If you don't personally like it, you can pay more for a device with better lower-end specs from someone else.

Are you some kind of capitalist apologist or something? I never offered an opinion on whether I like it or not, I was simply pointing out that this is what businesses do.

Same volume, same price, higher return on investment. If you don't personally like it, you can pay more for a device with better lower-end specs from someone else.

Perhaps you didn't read carefully enough my previous comment: All the manufacturers of mechanical drives are going to be doing the same thing. There isn't anyone else to buy these magical unicorns you speak of from.

And if 7,200 RPM drives can't be made more reliable for an affordable price, I expect that is why Seagate is dropping them completely.

As has been covered before, reliability is not what is driving these changes.

Hybrids are a way to sell a slightly faster version of the mechanical drive for people on a budget who still need reliability.

Lolwut? You're taking the exact same product, gluing it to another product, and that improves reliability? What planet are you from where increasing the complexity of a device improves reliability? Engineers, software and mechanical, rely on the KISS principle for a reason -- it makes troubleshooting easier, and it improves reliability. Complexity is antithetical to reliability. If you want a classic example of how complex design can cause all kinds of reliability issues, look at the LOX engines on the space shuttle. Some of the most complex machinery ever designed -- and it was built top-down, not bottom-up. And every engineer who worked on it will tell you, they honestly don't know all the possible failure conditions because of that. It's simply too complex.

Re:Hey, Seagate:

[cheater512]

Not sure that it applies here.

HDDs are mature, but aren't going to be obsolete for awhile yet.
SSDs are new and finally becoming affordable.

Seagate managed to take a well established technology, blend it in with the new technology, and make both somewhat worse.
Thats just a bog standard fail.

Re:Hey, Seagate:

[hawguy]

and then praying they don't look an aisle over and realize that a modest SSD would blow it out of the water for not much more cash.

Only if they don't need the storage capacity of the spinning hard drive... many laptops don't have the room for both an SSD and a hard drive.

The smallest Seagate SSHD is 500GB and costrs around $99. The cheapest 500GB SSD I can find costs around $350.

So, for those that need the higher capacity, you can't get an SSD for "not much more cash".

So yes, an SSD would have much better performance, but not equivalent capacity at the same price point. For the kinds of things most people use a laptop for (booting windows, loading apps) the SSHD gives close to SSD performance, while still letting them keep their large media files on the hard drive

It's a douche move, but... it's sound business practice. Sell your customers down a river to keep profits up until you can turn up production on the Next Big Thing, and then try to buy them back later with discounts and deals.

Slower speeds aren't just a cost cutting move - cutting the speed reduces noise, power consumption (so you get better battery life on your laptop) and lowers heat production (so you get better reliability for your hard drive).

Re:Hey, Seagate:

[nabsltd]

Their hybrid nature does not affect data recovery. All the onboard SSD does is cache data that exists on the HDD.

There is no way to know what will happen to the overall usability of the drive if the flash fails (either through normal write exhaustion or catastrophic failure).

Hopefully, Seagate did the right thing in this case and the drive would turn into the equivalent of a pure mechanical drive. But, failure of the flash or its controller might cause the drive to become completely unusable. Unless they specifically deal with this as a "special" failure mode, it wouldn't be that different from some essential part of the controller on a purely mechanical drive failing (like the DRAM cache), and that usually turns the drive into a doorstop.

Re:Hey, Seagate:

[spire3661]

This is a mostly moot argument. If you are relying on one drive for your data, you are doing it VERY wrong. In a proper setup, the user would restore from backup and move on. If the drive had high value data, and no backups, you send the platters off to specialist recovery. The only people your scenario would affect are ones who deserve it.

Re:Hey, Seagate:

[Anonymous Coward]

As much as I hate to say "I told you so"...

Fuck off, you love saying "I told you so".

Re:Hey, Seagate:

[plover]

And why are the magical unicorns going extinct? No demand. People on a budget buy a slow drive, people who can afford slightly more buy an SSD hybrid, people who have the means and require the performance buy an expensive SSD. If Seagate saw there was a market for expensive yet still slow 7,200 RPM drives, they'd keep making them. (Actually they still do have a few, it's their corporate customers who are too large and slow to make a more rational decision.)

Sorry I wasn't clear about the reliability thing. Seagate's 5,200 RPM drives have twice the reliability when compared to their 7,200 RPM drives (the Annual Failure Rate is predicted at 0.48%[1] vs 1.065%[2]), and the difference made by adding the complexity of a cache gives them a predicted AFR of only 0.50%. And reliability is absolutely driving this: if they have to double the reliability of their 7,200 RPM drives, they will cost more than plain old SSDs (also at 0.50% AFR[1]).

[1] http://origin-www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/laptop-hard-drives/
[2] http://origin-www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/enterprise-hard-drives/hdd/enterprise-value-hdd/

Re:Hey, Seagate:

[smash]

1. It is SLC NAND and far more reliable than consumer SSD style MLC. 2. Pretty sure anandtech did a piece on them mentioning that NAND failure results in regular spinning drive behaviour.

Re:Hey, Seagate:

[smash]

Yup, exact reason i have a Momentus XT 750. Sure, an SSD would be faster. At not providing the capacity I require... causing me to spend more of my time fucking around moving files between it and an external drive (essentially, doing a poor job of SSD/HD caching manually on a per-folder level rather than per block).

Re:Hey, Seagate:

[TheLink]

Other than the bootup and game tests, the tests don't seem to test the caching ability as much.

The file copying tests should have been done more than once from the drive to the drive itself. Or from the drive to a ramdisk.

Re:Hey, Seagate:

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that we're now stuck in a perfect shitstorm that none of us were truly prepared to handle when it arrived -- we now have SSDs that drop dead almost at random, conventional spinning-disc drives whose reliability has degraded almost to the levels of SSDs, filesystems that are too big for FATxx, and 64-bit versions of Windows that take hostility towards anything besides NTFS to new levels, and are hellbent on enforcing security settings via subtle metadata side-effects that really come around and bite you if you try using files saved under one installation of Windows under a later one.

In the old days, if a drive died, you could restore it to a second drive or partition as FAT32, knowing it was going to nicely scrub away all the annoying ownership metadata that might confuse your next installation of Windows on your new C: drive. Now, I've recovered files under Linux from filesystems that were too completely fucked and toxic for Windows to touch, copied them to new discs (that unfortunately had to be NTFS), then had the new installation of Windows completely choke on the volume the next time I booted into Windows. Or had directories and files that seemed OK as long as I was moving things around from the command prompt, but Windows started projectile-vomiting the moment I tried to do anything with Explorer. I've ended up with files and entire directories that Linux can see and use just fine, but Windows refuses to allow me to even view the properties of. Sometimes, taking ownership works... sometimes, it just crashes Windows, and corrupts the files I was trying to take ownership of. Other times, Windows spends literally 4 days trying to repair the NTFS ACL metadata... and if I'm lucky, it finishes.

For the past year or so, I've had a largely dysfunctional desktop PC whose past 18 years' worth of data (some going all the way back to Amiga files that made their way over to my first PC one 720k hybrid floppy at a time) is now multiply backed up, restored, and duplicated god knows how many times so that I have ~1.5TB of real data filling 5 or 6 drives (depending upon how you want to count them) with about 8-10TB of storage between them.. some scraped and salvaged as earlier drives were taking their last breaths. The time and date stamps are fucked to hell, and I don't even know where to start trying to clean up the mess and get back to having a computer with storage I can trust again. I'm terrified to delete anything for fear it might be the one last good copy of that file I have (or that the drive it's on, and the drive with my second and final copy might die before I get the first fully cleaned up and backed up again), but trying to find something like the sourcecode to a program I worked on 2 years ago has turned into a hide & seek nightmare.

How'd it happen? Three hard drive failures in a row... first, my OCZ Vertex2 went to hell. Fortunately, I was backing it up to my Velociraptor more or less daily, and had periodic backups of my Velociraptor on both a 1.5TB Seagate internal drive and a 2TB external WD drive. Then, about a month after I got Windows reinstalled and was about 3/4 through restoring the backups from my other drives, the Velociraptor kicked the bucket. That REALLY threw me for a loop, because that was the drive that had not only my latest copies of everything, but it was ALSO the drive where I was sifting and sorting through the SSD's wreckage. I got another drive, then started sifting through my backups again (after making a full, complete backup of my remaining drives just to be safe), then the Vertex2 corrupted itself yet again. I wasn't even halfway through cleaning up the mess from the Vertex2's second self-immolation when my THIRD drive died.

The death of drive #3 scared the bejesus out of me, because it sank in for the first time that I was at genuine risk of losing every file I'd ever had in my life, forever. In total panic, I ran out and bought two more 3TB drives, and made full backups of my one remaining good drive... and sent one drive to my parents' hou

Re:Hey, Seagate:

[spire3661]

Stop relying solely on Windows to handle disks and files, it is absolutely terrible unless you work the command line. It chokes on lots of little things and as you said, has weirdo restrictions. Use Linux if a disk is tricky, make scripts to search your data, get a NAS and consolidate your data. Separate OS data from personal data. Honestly your problem is your huge data set and lack of organization. Data > hardware.

Re:Hey, Seagate:

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes! I did warn them! They called me a crazy consipracy nut and said something about tinfoil... and ignored me.

Same thing everyone does when someone tells them something unpleasant and hard to believe.

Thats why the people who actually can predict the future shut the fuck up ages ago... and we're left with phony 'psychics' who want your money.

Re:Hey, Seagate:

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes they did.

In the 1990's DEC had a disk drive that was a 1:! match between the HDD Capacity and the Cache Memory. All the HDD contents were written to the Cache and only updates to the cache got written back to the HDD.
Ok, the capacity was in 10;s of MBytes but the principle was the same.

Re:Hey, Seagate:

[bazorg]

the consumers are idiots and will fall for four color marketing glossies saying these are the "fastest mechanical drives ever!" and boldly print the percentages all over the packaging... and then praying they don't look an aisle over and realize that a modest SSD would blow it out of the water for not much more cash

IMHO the product fills a gap in the market precisely because you can't just get a suitable SSD for "not much more cash". I looked at ebuyer just now and found the Seagate 750GB Momentus XT SSD cost £83, with a 750GB 7200rpm drive aided by 8GB NAND. For some it will be a more reasonable compromise than to lose the optical drive and pay the same £80 for a 120GB SSD. (or to pay £15 for the SSD-5.25 caddy and leave £65 for a smaller SSD)

Re:Hey, Seagate:

[spike6479]

Their hybrid nature does not affect data recovery. All the onboard SSD does is cache data that exists on the HDD.

There is no way to know what will happen to the overall usability of the drive if the flash fails (either through normal write exhaustion or catastrophic failure).

Hopefully, Seagate did the right thing in this case and the drive would turn into the equivalent of a pure mechanical drive. But, failure of the flash or its controller might cause the drive to become completely unusable. Unless they specifically deal with this as a "special" failure mode, it wouldn't be that different from some essential part of the controller on a purely mechanical drive failing (like the DRAM cache), and that usually turns the drive into a doorstop.

A small point. The flash cache is not critical to the operation of the drive. The DRAM on a drive is used for executing firmware, in addition to acting as buffer space, and is therefore critical to the operation of the drive. DRAM failure creates a brick because it can't run the firmware.

Re:Hey, Seagate:

[guruevi]

Yes. It was sometimes on-controller cache with BBU, sometimes actual SSD's, sometimes the spinning rust were caches for tapes.

Re:Hey, Seagate:

[Jane Q. Public]

I'd just like to see regular old benchmarks done, like Tom's Hardware and other sites routinely do.

The old 7200 RPM hybrid Momentus XT was even faster (write times, not just read) than some of the SSDs it was compared to. Of course I doubt very much that a 5400 RPM will keep up, regardless of their caching technology.

Spin latency is spin latency. It's one of the few things you simply can't do anything about on a spinning platter, no matter how good your electronics and head seek are *. And all other things being equal, it's just plain lower on a disk that spins faster. Period.

(* If your head seek is insanely fast, your latency may go down a bit because it takes fewer revolutions for the disk to come up to the right sector. But we're talking about consumer drives here. They aren't that kind of insanely fast.)

Re:Hey, Seagate:

[CanHasDIY]

Thats why the people who actually can predict the future shut the fuck up ages ago... and we're left with phony 'psychics' who want your money.

I think they prefer to be called "futurists" these days.

Laptop 7200rpm drives discontinued

[SpaceManFlip]

This is because they recently announced the discontinuation of their entire lineup of 7200rpm drives in the 2.5" form factor.

Desktop drives in 3.5" size still have the 7200rpm drive speeds, so the smaller ones have been gimped by Seagate's mfr'ing decision

Re:Laptop 7200rpm drives discontinued

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF? What does Seagate have against nice things?

Re:Laptop 7200rpm drives discontinued

[Anonymous Coward]

2.5" SATA hard drives at 7200 RPM have no future. Anyone who's willing to pony up for something faster than 5400 is going to buy a SSD.

Re:Laptop 7200rpm drives discontinued

[Mike Frett]

Except me. I'll stick to real Hard Drives until I'm forced to buy into SSD. I just don't trust SSD right now, I've seen too many failures and too many comments about issues. But I have zero problems switching when that's all worked out.

That's just the way I am, I stick to things that just work until they aren't available anymore. I always choose stability and reliability over the newest component. It's got nothing to do with being afraid of change.

Re:Laptop 7200rpm drives discontinued

[spire3661]

You dont trust ANY 'disk drive'. You backup and recover, just like any other storage medium. Trust doesnt even enter the equation.

Re:Laptop 7200rpm drives discontinued

[smash]

That. All drives are unreliable.

Re:Laptop 7200rpm drives discontinued

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you're making terrible technical decisions.

You will never, ever go back to traditional hard disk drives after using an SSD. But if you think that either technology is reliable enough to be used without a good backup strategy, you're better off picking lettuce for a living.

Re:Laptop 7200rpm drives discontinued

[flargleblarg]

Mod parent up! Awesome.

Re:Laptop 7200rpm drives discontinued

[Anonymous Coward]

But if you think that either technology is reliable enough to be used without a good backup strategy, you're better off picking lettuce for a living.

Don't be ridiculous. Power-sipping, no-moving-parts SSDs are far better suited for a life on the lettuce field than traditional HDDs.

Re:Laptop 7200rpm drives discontinued

[Anonymous Coward]

> You will never, ever go back to traditional hard disk drives after using an SSD.

Famous last words from somebody who's never experienced the sting and scourge of Sandforce. Having been burned multiple times, I won't use a SSD for anything besides a write-through cache (a.k.a. "continuous realtime backup to a normal hard drive").

Every SSD manufacturer loves to talk about having millions of hours between failure... total HARDWARE failure. Filesystem corruption due to controller flaws doesn't count. The half-life of the data itself on those drives is another story entirely.The fact that Sandforce controllers enforce mandatory encryption, store the key in a protected location where you can't get access to it, and blow it away if you reflash the firmware, so that god himself couldn't recover your data when the drive decides to corrupt itself, is the real scandal. A SSD failure SHOULD mean "reflash recovery firmware to the drive, rip the bits onto another drive, and do offline recovery with minimal drama and 99.9% success", not "You're more fucked than if the drive sank on a ship and spent 10 years rusting on the ocean floor".

Re:Laptop 7200rpm drives discontinued

[SpaceManFlip]

The solution to your gripes is to avoid Sandforce. That's what I did, being a cautious consumer, when I purchased my first 4 SSD's.

SSD's by Intel with their in-house controller design seem to be good. I was discouraged to see some of theirs running on Sandforces though. I bought an Intel 320 drive with the 5-yr warranty first, and it's been doing really well for a while.

Generally I look for the drives made by RAM manufacturers known for quality products, with their own controller brand in the SSD. Crucial, Samsung, etc. So far so good, no SSD failures yet out of my personal batch of 4. Newest one was a cheap little SanDisk with (I think) a Marvell controller.

Yawn

[Anonymous Coward]

Hybrid drives are a shitty stop-gap. I can't wait for terabyte SSDs to get cheap.

Re:Yawn

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Hybrid drives are a shitty stop-gap. I can't wait for terabyte SSDs to get cheap.

It disgusts me that you would even think of computing with silicon. I'm holding out for hypersentient quantum computronium...

Re:Yawn

[Type44Q]

I'm holding out for hypersentient quantum computronium...

I wonder if it would be inherently "hypersentient" (whatever the fuck that means) or would only become so after your mindstate's been uploaded to it... :p

Re:Yawn

[Molochi]

I think Superintelligent Shades of the Color Blue keep them (HQPs) as pets.

Re:Yawn

[Type44Q]

lol, nice! I know that sounds distinctly familiar; Douglas Adams?

semi serious question

[scream at the sky]

Why are we not seeing more 10K drives? Other than the WD Raptors, I haven't seen 10K desktop drives in forever.

I would think it would be a better compromise, am I missing something?

Re:semi serious question

[lesincompetent]

They're too busy saving energy... goddamn treehuggers!

Re:semi serious question

[AuMatar]

Noise issues, power issues, and the likelihood that cheapening SSD will make magnetic disks obsolete. People who really care about speed just go solid state. With the price dropping I'm sure we all will in a few years.

Re:semi serious question

[sl4shd0rk]

Why are we not seeing more 10K drives?

Only reason I can think of is direct competition with top-shelf scsi hardware. a 900G 10K SCSI is about $500 bucks. I sure would be tempted to RAID twice as many 10K SATA for half that price if I could get the same RPM.

Re:semi serious question

[dlakelan]

Higher density at constant speed means higher signalling rates now vs before. We're already reading more off the disk per second at 7200 rpm than we were at 7200 rpm back when 200GB was big. Power requirements have taken a bigger position, and also at the higher densities tolerances need to be more exact and even more so at higher speeds. Going to lower spinning speeds allows you to get better results without tightening tolerances as much.

Re:semi serious question

[DigiShaman]

Because 10K RPM drives command a high MTBF rate. You're not going to find those except in SAS.

Re:semi serious question

[gl4ss]

more expensive to make, makes slightly more noise. in a laptop they burn more power too(well on desktop as well but on laptop it matters).
I guess the market on that has gone to ssd's at up front and slower drives at back.
So seagate bundled a nominal amount of crap ssd with slow drives an called it a day and suckers bought 'em - because technically on paper it's great, right? best of both worlds? or shit from both?

when they plaster allover on their "tech specs" that it's a hybrid drive with ssd but would rather tell how much cache it is than the fact that it has measly 8 gigs of ssd you know that something is up. I mean, these drives might have some point in them if they had 60 gig or so ssd portions. but 8? you can fit the os on that, so you boot faster - if you're doing sequential boots and nothing else.

Re:semi serious question

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Why are we not seeing more 10K drives? Other than the WD Raptors, I haven't seen 10K desktop drives in forever.

I would think it would be a better compromise, am I missing something?

10Ks on the desktop(and, at least to some degree, although less of one, 10 and 15Ks in the enterprise) have been curb-stomped by SSDs, actually harder than their slower brethren.

Everybody knows that 5.4s and 7.2s are horribly slow, for everything except very well behaved linear reads or writes; but they are insanely capacious and cheap, so people who don't need speed buy them anyway, and by the truckload. On the consumer end, cheap shit sells by the pallet, and needs something to boot from, and on the enterprise side the (partial) unification of SAS and SATA means that a lot of stuff that you used to have to dump right to tape can now be handed off to crazy-cheap 'nearline' HDD storage(and, in sufficient quantity, a lot of less demanding storage tasks are perfectly fine on prosaic 7.2K SATA, and since SATA drives drop right into SAS slots/connectors, they all play nicely with the RAID backplanes and hot-swap trays and things, which wasn't the case back in the PATA/SCSI days).

Among people who need I/O above all, any mechanical drive is an amusing little smudge clinging to the X axis when graphed against the performance of any halfway decent SSD. When a good SSD can easily be several orders of magnitude faster, the fact that you might(best case) triple performance by going from 5.4k to 15k barely registers; but the price of increasing spindle speeds certainly does.

Velociraptors, and their ilk, had a brief period of popularity back when all the 15Ks were SCSI(and so were either wildly expensive, or dodgy fleabay gear, and usually needed an add-on card that cost more than most consumer hard drives, even used) and SSDs were either nonexistent or more expensive than entire workstations. Now, they just aren't a terribly impressive offering. If you don't care much, you can get a rather larger and quieter HDD for substantially less money. If you do care, a surprisingly small premium will get you an SSD that will blow the Velociraptor out of the water.

The gulf between good solid state storage and mechanical storage, in terms of latency, is just so enormous that we will probably see more retreating from higher spindle speeds than advancing. High precision, high reliability mechanical parts are stubbornly costly, so increasing spindle speeds isn't free; but the performance gap is sufficiently vast that even some terrifying HDD built with ultracentrifuge technology just isn't going to be as fast as an SSD. Flash prices are still high enough that HDDs have plenty of retreating room into high capacity/high latency applications; but any attempt to achieve parity in low-latency work would just be comedic(if probably impressive from an engineering standpoint, and when it tore itself apart and shredded everything nearby)...

Re:semi serious question

[Firethorn]

1. Those wanting the extreme performance are buying SSDs today.
2. Power demand - more electricity and thus more cooling. Some countries have passed energy standards such that they can't be sold in pre-made computers, reducing the market.
3. Density - due to the lower density the faster speed requires today, said drives often have sustained reads/writes that are slower than their larger, cheaper 7200RPM cousin.
4. Reliability - they're less reliable due to the higher speeds and heat anymore.

There's just not enough demand to keep supplying them.

Re:semi serious question

[scream at the sky]

I get that, but I also see the flip side where 10K drives have typically been aimed at Enterprise, rather than consumer business.

I have a pair of ancient 74 gig raptors that I use for the boot system (raid 0) on my home NAS, and I love the disks. I'd love to see some consumer grade 10K drives with a standard warranty.

And, yes, I have SSD in my laptop, and I agree that spinning platters have a limited number of days, but for a company like Seagate who is pussying around with these hybrid drives, it would make sense for them to do what they do well, instead of half assing something, and giving us half a solution.

Re:semi serious question

[scream at the sky]

higher density at 10K would still give tremendous rewards though.

Admittedly, it would just be a stop gap, eventually SSD will be everything, I get that, but in the mean time I would like to see Seagate and WD do what they do really well, rather than give us half baked solutions like these hybrid drives.

Re:semi serious question

[Anonymous Coward]

Heat and reliability. I lost like 30% of my 10k WD Raptors over 5 years. Theres something to be said about those mondo expensive old Seagate SCSI 10ks.

Re:semi serious question

[gagol]

Even Windows don't read 8GB of data on boot. My Linux boot in no time on an old 5400 RPM drive. Blame software bloat, not hardware.

Re:semi serious question

[spire3661]

SSDs are going to sweep them away in five years for everywhere but servers. HDD is pretty much a dead end at this point.

Re:semi serious question

[TubeSteak]

I sure would be tempted to RAID twice as many 10K SATA for half that price if I could get the same RPM.

Short-stroking 7.2k drives is cheaper and you will outperform 10K drives all day.

We used to short stroke 10k/15k drives, but SSDs have taken over those jobs.

Re:semi serious question

[silas_moeckel]

Because there is no good use case for them.

256GB SSD's are less than a buck a GB and outperform a small raid set in everything but size. Put these in desktops laptops pretty much anything with a person sitting in front of it.

3TB drives are about 120 bucks, USB3 externals are nearly as fast as an internal sata one (piles of overhead as USB sucks like always) these are your bulk storage drives. Bulk servers get these combine with a SSD caching and raid to get a small raid 10 outperforming a big raid of 15's in all but extreme cases. Unless you running 10ge you can not shift the data to the device fast enough.

10k's really do not fit anywhere. 15k were to hot for desktops and to power hungry for laptops they only really fit in high end SAN/NAS boxes with huge SSD in front of them.

Re:semi serious question

[ltwally]

Why are we not seeing more 10K drives? Other than the WD Raptors, I haven't seen 10K desktop drives in forever. I would think it would be a better compromise, am I missing something?

There are two sides to traditional hard-disk performance: rotational-speed and areal-density. While both increase performance of the disk, they do so in different ways...

Rotational Speed, measured in RPMs, primarily affects random access/seek times -- allowing the disk heads to move to a new location more quickly. This is handy when there is heavy fragmentation (which should never be allowed to happen) or when the data files themselves have lots of non-consecutive data (like in databases). Higher rotational speed will increase transfer speeds... but not nearly so much as most folks think it will. The disk access patterns for most desktop users do take enough advantage of this to make the increased cost worthwhile.

Areal Density, measured in bits/m^2 or bits/in^2, primarily effects continuous transfer speed -- you get to read/write large files more quickly. This will help you more quickly transfer files on your network (though many/most disks can easily enough saturate gigabit ethernet, these days) or load large files into memory, such as the case for video games or other applications with large resource files. Areal density does not have much of an impact on random seek times, and so those numbers haven't seen much improvement over the years. Improving areal density is something drive manufacturers have a keen interest in, as it allows them to build disks with more storage capacity, thereby decreasing the number of platters necessary for a given amount of space, and therefore dropping prices.

Also, keep in mind that, to keep friction/heat/wear-and-tear down, 10k RPM drives tend to have fewer and smaller platters than 7,200 & 5,400 RPM drives; they are hamstringed for storage space. Consider that we now have 4 TB 7,200 RPM drives on the market, but the largest 10k RPM drive is only 1 TB. And the price is about the same.

Both sides of the coin effect performance, but in different ways. Given the amount of time that 10k RPM SATA drives have been on the market, I think it's safe to say that these will never catch on, and that their price will always remain high. 15k RPM desktop drives is nothing but a pipe dream.

SSDs, on the other hand, have ludicrous transfer speeds married to access times that make a 15k RPM drives look pathetic. Their only two caveats seem to be storage space (they still can't keep with traditional hard disks on that, but they're catching up) and reliability. Though flash memory is far from ideal, we can expect both density and reliability to increase over time, even as their transfer rates continue to compete with small RAID arrays.

SSDs already outpace 10k & 15k RPM hard disks in ever measurement of speed. Given time, they will likely catch up in storage capacity and bytes-per-dollar. And, by the looks of it, that point in time is rapidly approaching.

Re:semi serious question

[plover]

They're just adding another choice that appeals to a certain segment of the market. They have cheap, reliable, and slow 5,400 RPM drives; slightly more expensive, just as reliable, and slightly faster 5,400 RPM hybrid drives; or slightly more expensive and crazy fast SSDs. 10K drives are as expensive as SSDs, yet far slower than SSDs and only slightly more reliable than the cheap 5,400 RPM drives. There's not a big value proposition for the 10K drives, and the market isn't really looking for them.

By the way, we did an analysis on a set of twenty-four enterprise class 15,000-RPM Cheetah drives installed in developer workstations. They have a published MTBF of 1,200,000 hours, yet we lost eight of the 24 drives (25%) within 50,000 hours, all suffering catastrophic failure at less than 5% of their claimed life. High speed and high price did not automatically guarantee reliability. (And their published MTBF should have been found in the "fiction" category.)

Re:semi serious question

[Jane Q. Public]

"Higher density at constant speed means higher signalling rates now vs before. We're already reading more off the disk per second at 7200 rpm than we were at 7200 rpm back when 200GB was big. Power requirements have taken a bigger position, and also at the higher densities tolerances need to be more exact and even more so at higher speeds. Going to lower spinning speeds allows you to get better results without tightening tolerances as much."

You might as well have just said: $$$.

Re:semi serious question

[Jane Q. Public]

Actually, WD had some consumer 10k drives out... probably still does.

Re:semi serious question

[ltwally]

...The disk access patterns for most desktop users do take enough advantage of this to make the increased cost worthwhile. ...

Meant to say "The disk access patterns for most desktop users do NOT take enough advantage of this to make the increased cost worthwhile."

Someone hack an edit button onto this damn site already. Get with '90s, already.

Re:semi serious question

[MiSaunaSnob]

They are to loud

Re:semi serious question

[firex726]

In all seriousness, I never really got that, HDD uses like a whopping 20w, compared to the rest of the computer that's nothing.

Re:semi serious question

[Anonymous Coward]

SSDs are going to sweep them away in five years for everywhere but storage servers.

Fixed that for you.

SSD's already in servers. Woe to conventional disks if SSDs ever reach parity on price per gigabyte.

Re:semi serious question

[Anonymous Coward]

My living room computer has 6 HDDs and one 65W-rated Llano CPU (it typically uses less than 20W). I can assure you the power consumption of hard drives is not "nothing".

Re:semi serious question

[Anonymous Coward]

I lost like 50% of my WD Green drives over 2 years. It's a good thing they're dirt cheap to replace.

Re:semi serious question

[DigiShaman]

Raptors. I know because I had a pair in RAID0. The problem was that it they don't support TLER. Thus one of the drives would randomly drop offline. In fact, WD specifically will not support RAID with consumer based drives. As I know, at least Hitatchi drives supported TLER for all drives. Sounds like WD crippled their drives to force market segmentation.

Re:semi serious question

[firex726]

Well MOST people here won't be running six drives.
If you're drawing say 400watts under load the an extra 20 from the HDD won't mean jack.

Re:semi serious question

[Logger]

Why does everyone keeping thinking you have to have enough flash to store the whole os? Hybrids are sector based, not file or application based. They only needs to cache the frequently used bits in flash. Which might not even be a whole file.

If they are real clever (and I'm not saying they are), they could hide the seek time for a file by putting the first few sectors in flash. That would allow the drive time to find the rest of the file on disk.

There is obviously a cost performance tradeoff here. How much flash is needed to achieve a desired performance level can not be derived simply by using data from pairing an SSD with and HDD. It is also a function of the caching algorithm used.

There are only two things that can be surmised for sure about this drive. It's large file sequential transfer rate is going to be slower than a 7200 rpm drive. And pure random accesses will be slower than an SSD, because you can't fit everything into those 8GB of flash.

So, obviously if you are doing those two tasks a lot, this is a poor drive for you. On the other hand, that doesn't sound like a typical work load for the average user.

The only fault I find for this drive is they don't offer a 7200 rpm model in the 2.5" form factor. Was that a good decision? I don't know. They will might lose out on some aftermarket sales because of it. But then again, if those aftermarket purchases were so concerned with performance maybe those were going to be pure SSD sales anyways. I'm guessing this compromise is what Dell, Acer, HP, Samsung, and company were asking for.

So, if I had the cash to upgrade my laptop to 750 GB SSD, I'd do that. But I'm seriously thinking of giving one of these a try. I'd buy a 7200 rpm model if it existed in the 2.5" form factor, but this still has the potential to be a lot faster than the 5400 rpm drive I have now.

Re:semi serious question

[smash]

Depends on the computer and its usage. MAX TDP of a modern desktop CPU may be about 100 watts give or take, but when its running 99% idle most of the time the consumption is a lot less than that. My laptop for example generally consumes around 10-15 watts for the entire box. If you run multiple drives in RAID for speed or better reliability, drive consumption will be a much more significant portion of overall consumption.

Re:semi serious question

[Unknown Lamer]

I think the main appeal of desktop/workstation 10K RPM drives over 7200RPM drives was for realtime audio and video capture... the reduced seek times really help when you need to maintain constant write throughput Or Else (tm). But the folks doing that have moved onto SSDs, because disks for that purpose are basically expendable and SSDs cost less than a good 10K drive did only 3-4 years ago. And have tons of advantages for real time use (zero seek latency! No more need to tweak things and really hope the system and disk cooperate to give you full linear bandwidth with no I/O stuttering... I'm having flashbacks to 2003).

For bulk storage, there just isn't much of an advantage to justify the per gigabyte cost increase and higher failure rates. You may as well spend your money on more RAM (having a 14G disk cache is pretty nice).

Re:semi serious question

[Traciatim]

Even my OC'd 3570k with a 670 in it uses under 300 watts (~290) under benchmarks and demanding games. This is also measured from the wall, and since my PSU is about 85% efficient at that level of usage my computer is actually using 246 watts or so. This means 20 watts for a drive is still going to be 8.1%. At idle with the drive still spinning my machine is using around 80 watts or so from the wall. My PSU would be less efficient here, probably closer to 80%, which puts actual machine usage at 64 watts, making 20 watts a 31% increase. I'm not sure of the international agreed upon amount that is falls under the label "jack" . . . but I'm pretty certain this isn't included.

Re:semi serious question

[Anonymous Coward]

Common 3.5" desktop HDDs use no more than about 10W, except for short bursts during spinup.

More importantly, common desktop HDDs are put into common desktop computer enclosures with bad or no airflow over the HDD. They have to be engineered to not overheat in such scenarios. Enterprise 10K and 15K drives get to assume a lot more airflow.

Also, 3.5" platters are practical at 7200 RPM, but not so much at 10K RPM. If you take apart any supposedly 3.5" 10K RPM HDD, you'll find 3.0" platters inside. But actually, nobody even makes those any more, these days it's all 2.5". (See also the WD Raptor, which these days is an enterprise 2.5" 10K HDD bolted to a cast aluminum 3.5" frame slash heatsink.) The higher the RPMs, the more centripetal force on the outer edges of the platter. To work at high RPMs and larger sizes, the platters have to be made thicker (for more strength), it takes disproportionate amounts of power to keep the extra mass spinning, there's more load on the main bearing, and so forth. (Note that it's also really important, at modern recording densities, to keep internal vibration down.) So a whole bunch of factors conspire to make it difficult to build a high capacity drive at 10K RPM or above.

Go look at Seagate's 10K RPM enterprise lineup. These days it's all enterprise 2.5" form factor, which is not mechanically compatible with ordinary 2.5" laptop HDDs, and the largest drive is just 900GB.

Re:semi serious question

[Anonymous Coward]

By the way, we did an analysis on a set of twenty-four enterprise class 15,000-RPM Cheetah drives installed in developer workstations. They have a published MTBF of 1,200,000 hours, yet we lost eight of the 24 drives (25%) within 50,000 hours, all suffering catastrophic failure at less than 5% of their claimed life. High speed and high price did not automatically guarantee reliability. (And their published MTBF should have been found in the "fiction" category.)

MTBF doesn't mean what you think it means -- 1.2M hours doesn't mean you should expect any individual drive to last 1.2M hours. It's interpreted as a statistical measure across large populations. For a model rated at 1.2M hours, if you operate a population of 1,000 drives for 1,200 hours each, you'd expect one failure.

The actual service life of the drive is always a tiny fraction of the MTBF. You might be able to ferret out service lifespan figures from Seagate's documentation somewhere, but it's probably not much longer than the warranty length. Most widget failure rates follow a bathtub curve: high infant mortality, a long healthy midlife with low failure rates, and then the curve turns upwards again at the end as components begin to wear out. Hard drives are no exception. So HDD mfrs try to predict when failure rates will spike upwards again, define the service life as ending before then, and set warranty lengths to match. (Or they use the desired warranty length as a must-exceed service life target during design and test -- same difference.)

Getting back to MTBF, published MTBF figures never attempt to cover hours accumulated past the expected lifespan. They're solely attempts to predict failure rate averaged across infant mortality and midlife. Note that if any of those failed drives lasted for about 50K hours, they were probably into the end-of-life part of the bathtub curve, as that's more than 5 years (which is Seagate's usual warranty for enterprise drives).

Also, MTBF truly is a prediction. As I understand it, sometimes HDD mfrs will update MTBF numbers once a drive model is in the field and they're able to gather hard data, but the initial figure is always produced by doing actuary-like prediction based on component-level failure curves observed in previous models, plus attempts to predict failure rates of new and/or updated components as well as factors derived from how they're combined together.

Re:semi serious question

[plover]

I'm very aware of MBTF and how it works across equipment populations. That's why I pointed out there were 24 drives in our set, and we had 8 failures. 24 drives x 50,000 operating hours = 1,200,000 total operating hours. Seagate's published MBTF is 1,200,000 hours (which is purely a coincidence, but very convenient for doing the math.) We experienced eight failures during a time frame when their prediction indicated we should have experienced one failure. The easy-to-compute MBTF that we actually experienced was 1,200,000/8 = 150,000 hours, not 1,200,000 hours.

I understand the basis for making estimates falls to experience with previous designs, stress testing, initial measurements, infant mortality figures from the field, and that it's still only a guess on the best of days. But to be optimistic by a factor of eight? Even salesmen don't usually lie that badly. (It's also assuming the rest of the drives would continue working for the next couple of centuries, but as we've since divested ourselves of that equipment, we'll never know.)

Aside from the impact to hardware maintenance budgets (which were borne by the service organization, not us), we were looking to minimize developer disruption by providing them with the highest possible quality equipment. Knock out a developer's hard drive and you lose a couple days worth of work out of them while they wait for the repairs and then restore their environments. It's especially slow when dealing with custom built boxes where the service organization doesn't have spare drives lying about. Those losses are far more than the extra cost of a premium drive, and is part of what we were trying to avoid.

Re:semi serious question

[plover]

Oh, we didn't experience all 8 failures simultaneously at 50,000 hours, either. Those failures occurred throughout the life of the deployment, not just at the tail end. They began about a year in, and failed sporadically throughout their service lifetime.

Re:semi serious question

[Miamicanes]

Beware... mechanically, a Velociraptor is NOT "enterprise grade". If you try to treat one like it is, disable spin-down, and leave it spinning 24/7, there's a VERY high likelihood that it won't live to see its second birthday. Their build quality is probably a few notches above average consumer drives (which now seem to fail after 6-14 months when kept spinning 24/7), but they also tend to get run a lot harder than average consumer drives, and their failure rate among the nerd elite appears to be a LOT worse than enterprise-class 7200rpm drives. Storagereview.com has been tracking Velociraptor failure rates for years... and they're sobering.

Re:semi serious question

[Jane Q. Public]

Our discussion was specifically about consumer-grade drives.

New Seagate product, you say?

[ArcadeMan]

I'm not interested.

Epic failure

[onyxruby]

How the hell did this thing ever make it through the approval process? This is going to piss of their users as a basic trust issue and is borderline fraudulent. The entire point of getting a drive like this is to get something /faster/ than you would other wise get. This drive is going to be entirely dependent on a very limited number of benchmarks to get any kind of approval at all.

This is akin to selling a new sports car with a decade old engine that was outdated by the model 2 generations ago. This has got to be one of the biggest epic fails of the last couple years outside of Windows 8 itself. The advertising and marketing on this can't possibly be honest without playing lawyer and splitting hairs very finely.

Re:Epic failure

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, most people want their OS to boot faster and their applications to start faster. They're not likely to be running a heavily-loaded database on these things.

Re:Epic failure

[jedidiah]

People who mindlessly jump on the bandwagon rather than checking reviews and benchmarks and comparing that to their actual needs are going to be disappointed regardless.

Re:Epic failure

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I would strongly suspect that it's an OEM thing, mostly:

Intel, for one, sets some fairly strict boot-time requirement for an OEM to be able to slap "Ultrabook!!!!" on the laptop and possibly get some Intel 'marketing assistance' cash. Microsoft has also been doing a bit of leaning on OEMs in terms of how fast Win8 machines need to boot in order to earn their little sticker of meaningless approval.

OEMs, of course, still need to shove $400 black-friday specials out the door. What will we do? Well, it just so happens that our good buddies at Seagate have a hard drive that is super cheap, being a very undemanding mechanical model with only a small amount of flash; but just so happens to be able to(if configured and pre-cached and whatnot properly) boot the OS like a bat out of hell... Seagate proceeds to sell a giant pile of the things.

Given that Seagate knows that benchmarks are going to happen, they have no realistic hope of pulling the wool over the eyes of informed enthusiasts. I'd be surprised if they care: less cost-sensitive enthusiasts are going to buy SSDs anyway, more cost-sensitive ones may well buy if the price is right, and making the spindle slow and the cache small will definitely help there.

As a strategy for launching a successful enthusiast storage brand, Seagate's choices would be suicide; but 'enthusiast storage' isn't a terribly big market anyway, and the SSD guys own it now, so Seagate doesn't have a choice about not playing there. The OEMs, on the other hand, are caught between certification demands(which generally specify boot time, resume-time, etc. not 'IOPS Random 4k' scores) and price pressures. This product looks like it is tailor-made to be pitched right at them.

Re:Epic failure

[RR]

I don't think it's a fraud. They're not calling it a Momentus XT. It's a relatively cheap hard drive that happens to be much faster than other cheap drives at booting and launching programs, and much cheaper than SSDs of similar capacity. (Also, faster than the Momentus XT at certain tasks, while being thinner but taking more power.)

So, it turns out to be slower than a WD Scorpio Black at copying folders full of lots of big files. How often do you actually wait on that? On the other hand, it's much faster than a WD Scorpio Black at booting up and launching programs. Now, how often you do for that? I think the average person would be better served by a Laptop Thin SSHD than a Scorpio Black.

It all has to do with what you use the drive for.

Re:Epic failure

[onyxruby]

Interesting answer with some good points for consideration.

Bypassed this idea...

[ackthpt]

When it came time to upgrade my aging desktop I went straight for SSD and as much memory as I could cram on the motherboard. Works good and is fast

Battery Life?

[TheNinjaroach]

See the current Slashdot poll about laptops. The winning request is better battery life. How much extra juice does it take to spin those platters at 7200RPM? Perhaps Seagate's manufacturing decision to use 5400 is better informed than it appears.

Re:Battery Life?

[Applekid]

See the current Slashdot poll about laptops. The winning request is better battery life. How much extra juice does it take to spin those platters at 7200RPM? Perhaps Seagate's manufacturing decision to use 5400 is better informed than it appears.

I would instead urge hard drive manufacturers to take a page from the CPU manufacturers and get busy on a variable speed hard drive. I see no reason why a hard drive can't just putt putt around at a slow speed and ramp up that speed if the IO queue starts filling faster than it can be emptied.

Re:Battery Life?

[BLToday]

"How much extra juice does it take to spin those platters at 7200RPM? "

From my experience with their 1st-gen Momentus XT (500GB), about 15% reduction in overall battery life compare to my previous 5400 rpm drive.

Re:Battery Life?

[TheGratefulNet]

I know YOU see no reason for not having vari speed in mechanics.

then again, its very clear to me that you have no clue how the electronics, clocking and mechanics would DO that.

maybe, just maybe, its not do-able within reason.

varispeed is marketing BS. it makes no sense to vary platter speed. stupid idea, in fact!

Re:Battery Life?

[jones_supa]

I see no reason why a hard drive can't just putt putt around at a slow speed and ramp up that speed if the IO queue starts filling faster than it can be emptied.

Does anyone know why this has not been done more already, especially in laptop drives? There has been some "eco" desktop 3.5" drives that can lower their speed when idle, but not much else.

Re:Battery Life?

[ackthpt]

I see no reason why a hard drive can't just putt putt around at a slow speed and ramp up that speed if the IO queue starts filling faster than it can be emptied.

Does anyone know why this has not been done more already, especially in laptop drives? There has been some "eco" desktop 3.5" drives that can lower their speed when idle, but not much else.

Seagate Barracuda ST3000DM001 (3TB 7200RPM) spin down to conserve power, unless you use power management tool to tell them to remain spinning at all times.

Re:Battery Life?

[dgatwood]

I see no reason why a hard drive can't just putt putt around at a slow speed and ramp up that speed if the IO queue starts filling faster than it can be emptied.

I thought I had read that WD's green drive did exactly that.

Re:Battery Life?

[Jane Q. Public]

"Perhaps Seagate's manufacturing decision to use 5400 is better informed than it appears."

In an era where users expect new hardware to consistently outperform the older models, no, 5400 RPM is not "better informed".

Backwards is backwards. Before they announced this decision, I was going to get a Momentus to replace the drive I have. Now, there is no way in hell I'll spend that money. My existing drive probably performs better. I'll just get an SSD instead. More money, but it's actually BETTER.

Re:Battery Life?

[Mashiki]

See the current Slashdot poll about laptops. The winning request is better battery life. How much extra juice does it take to spin those platters at 7200RPM? Perhaps Seagate's manufacturing decision to use 5400 is better informed than it appears.

Perhaps laptop companies should be switching to SSD's then, I nearly tripled the battery life on my 3yr old laptop which had a 5400rpm in it. Yes I know there are still reliability problems with them, but being realistic? The price for a 2.5" SSD at 120-240GB which is still semi-standard in a lot of common laptops, would seriously improve the battery life.

Re:Battery Life?

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't found a single hard drive that's not already capable of doing that.

Re:Battery Life?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's just as many, if not more, reliability problems with a spinning platter drive in a portable device.

Re:Battery Life?

[TheGratefulNet]

there are no drives that change their speed other than idle vs run-mode.

and that does not count; its just a standby mode. data transfer does not happen at 'slower speed' idle.

so again, the marketing guys fooled you.

Re:Battery Life?

[TheGratefulNet]

its false. dig deeper and you find that 'vari speed' is just a lie and there is only data transfer at the single speed.

idling does NOT count.

WD lied.

Re:Battery Life?

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple really. The flight height of the hard drive heads are tuned to the specific rotational rate of the drive. Change the RPM substantially and the heads fly at the wrong height, and your drive doesn't work anymore.

Drives that go to a slower speed while idling have to park the heads off the disk to prevent the heads from crashing into the disks at the lower speeds.

Re:Battery Life?

[Applekid]

I know YOU see no reason for not having vari speed in mechanics.

then again, its very clear to me that you have no clue how the electronics, clocking and mechanics would DO that.

maybe, just maybe, its not do-able within reason.

varispeed is marketing BS. it makes no sense to vary platter speed. stupid idea, in fact!

So light a candle instead of damning the darkness and clue us all in to how it won't work.

I remember when CD drives were all CAV and only ran at that one speed. I don't think you give engineers proper consideration for their craft.

Re:Battery Life?

[Applekid]

Simple really. The flight height of the hard drive heads are tuned to the specific rotational rate of the drive. Change the RPM substantially and the heads fly at the wrong height, and your drive doesn't work anymore.

Drives that go to a slower speed while idling have to park the heads off the disk to prevent the heads from crashing into the disks at the lower speeds.

Thank you, that's the kind of educational stuff I was looking for.

Why is that a problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been using a Seagate hybrid drive in my laptop for a couple years. I actually find it silly that it is a 7200 RPM drive.

Since most things are going to end up in cache, the platters are only going to be used for my media library, which will be easily faster than the read speed of a CD or DVD and even Blueray.

Limiting the power wasted by spinning a chunk of metal uselessly seems like a win to me.

replaced by SSDs and 2.5" drives

[Chirs]

10K was typically an enterprise thing. Enterprise has generally moved to either SSDs or to 2.5" drives (currently available in 10K and 15K).

The increased areal density gives decent capacity for the 2.5" drives, and the smaller platter means it's more robust, causes less vibration, and uses less power. It also takes up less space in a server.

Re:replaced by SSDs and 2.5" drives

[tlhIngan]

10K was typically an enterprise thing. Enterprise has generally moved to either SSDs or to 2.5" drives (currently available in 10K and 15K).

The increased areal density gives decent capacity for the 2.5" drives, and the smaller platter means it's more robust, causes less vibration, and uses less power. It also takes up less space in a server.

Most 10K 3.5" drives used 2.5" platters because at the speeds they spun at, there was no way a 3.5" platter would survive the rotational induced stresses. (Most of the additional bulk was used by cooling fins to help cool the platters - a good chunk of the heat a hard drive produces comes from friction... with air!)

In fact, the latest desktop 10K drives were 2.5" drives bolted to a huge heatsink (it was recommended to NOT remove the heatsink).

Due to their temperature sensitivity (they had to have good cooling) they were a limited market (servers, mostly, there were a few desktops that had it but they were limited by case designs), and relatively low capacity versus the more contemporary 7200RPM drives.

With SSDs, low capacity high speed drives were basically extinct - why buy a 320GB 10K drive when a 512GB SSD would often be cheaper (and faster, to boot).

Re:replaced by SSDs and 2.5" drives

[Anonymous Coward]

Not true for SANs. Definitely true for servers. Enterprise SAN storage is still heavily biased towards 3.5" drives.

Old 500 GB drive 750s are faster

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the old 500GB SSHD. The 750 is faster as reported by others. I just ordered the 1TB. I only wish they would bump the NAND to 16GB or 32GB. that would be very nice.

Some direct feedback

[Alarash]

I own a Samsung Series 5 Ultrabook. I don't want to bother looking up (or flipping the device back as I type this) the exact model but it basically has got an i5@1.7Ghz, 6 GB of RAM and Windows 8 (I like it, suck it up).

I can confirm that the device boots up disturbingly fast - either from a cold boot or from Sleep. I didn't time it but it feels like ~15-25 seconds. That gets me to the Welcome screen of Windows, and I can log in instantly. But if I try to start Visual Studio right after booting, I can definitively tell - from the LED - that the 5,400 drive is a problem. Right after booting, as Windows is, I assume, starting the various services and stuff, I can really feel the pain. I don't feel that on my main PC, which has got less RAM (4 GB) but a full-fledged SSD where the OS resides.

I paid 500 euros for that Ultrabook (Amazon repackaged). And for that price, I'm happy as a clam with that PC. If I allow something like 30 or 45 seconds for the session to actually completely open, the thing is blazing fast. A 7,200 RPM drive would drain the battery quicker (I have something like 6 hours of autonomy if I'm just coding - compiling from time o time - or just web surfing). I'd rather have a 256 GB SSD, but the price of those rose 30% in the last year so that might have put my PC around the 800/900 euros price point which, to me is not worth it.

This is not an advertisement or anything, just a direct feedback from a rather happy customer understanding the pros and cons of the technologies vs the price.

So 7200 5400?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope that didn't take years and millions of dollars worth research...

Still not buying seagate

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey Seagate!

The past few years I have had high failure rate with Seagate drives.
I stopped buying them and switched to a diff vendor. How about making some drives
that don't start to crap out so quickly like your drives do now!

Re:Still not buying seagate

[guruevi]

How 'bout that backup? I have had drives from massive number of vendors and types. They're all the same actually, they have very similar failure rates. Even Enterprise SATA and SAS have similar failure rates than Desktop SATA drives.

From someone who actually has the drive

[lyran74]

I installed one of the 500GB drives several days ago, and the performance improvement is incredible. Boot times are under a quarter what they used to be with the 5400RPM drive that came with the laptop (a 2011 Macbook Pro). Application launches are virtually instantaneous. It's like a new computer.

I can't speak to the abstract "overall performance" measurements from the article (random 4K response times? give me a break)--where this drive soars is in real-world, day-to-day performance, and the improvements are phenomenal.

Repeated writes are a weak spot for SSD, and this is where a hybrid drive should offer more reliability: cache the frequently-accessed, less-frequently changed data. Should the SSD fail, the drive will fall back to the platter.

The value proposition of these drives is unbeatable--vastly improved speed, great storage capacity, dirt-cheap prices. Let's hope the long-term reliability is what it should be.

7200RPM less reliable than 5400?

[King_TJ]

Umm.... can you cite any hard evidence this is really true?

You're absolutely right about the "optimization" of product lines that takes place. No argument there at all. But as far as I've been able to tell, 5400RPM drives are only around still because they're a little bit cheaper to build. Out of many hundreds of hard drives I've used over the years, I can't say I've ever felt like the 7200RPM models were less reliable?

Now, I do remember those Seagate Barracuda 10K and 15K RPM high performance SCSI drives having a lot of issues. (Bearing failures from overheating, usually.) But I doubt you're seeing a 5400RPM platter in these hybrid drives for reliability reasons. (Frankly, Seagate doesn't impress me anyway as a company that gives top concerns to reliability.... I've had more of their drives fail on me than any other brand, by a pretty big margin -- including multiple times they had firmware issues leading to premature failure in specific models.)

Re:7200RPM less reliable than 5400?

[TsuruchiBrian]

5400 rpm models use less power than 7200 models. In a notebook everything is about power usage and physical size, and I guess speed too.

I have 4TB 5400 rpm drives in my raid because my network is the bottleneck for speed anyway, and the cooler the drives run, the better (there is 5 of them).

Re:7200RPM less reliable than 5400?

[plover]

I just posted it above, but here it is again. Seagate's own published reliability information shows their 7200 RPM drives fail more than twice as often as either their 5400 RPM drives or their hybrid drives, and their SSDs are even more reliable.

Seagate's 5400 RPM and 5400 RPM hybrid drives fail annually at 0.48% and 0.50% respectively.
Their Pulsar SSD drives have an AFR of 0.44%
Their 7200 RPM 'enterprise value' drives have an AFR of 1.065%

Re:7200RPM less reliable than 5400?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're comparing apples with oranges. The AFR for the enterprise drives is based on 24/7 operation, Seagate consumer drives are designed for eight hour a day operation, so the enterprise has a lower rate of failure per hour of operation.

Just look at the data sheet for the Momentus drives and you will see that the AFR for the 5400 and 7200 rpm versions are identical. http://origin-www.seagate.com/files/www-content/product-content/momentus-fam/momentus-laptop/en-us/docs/momentus-family-ds1701-8-1303us.pdf

Re:7200RPM less reliable than 5400?

[plover]

Thanks, I missed that!

Makes sense for lower power use

[Bugler412]

One can argue pricing for the slower mechanical hardware, but the benefit for laptops is lower power use, not just for the drive itself but for the supporting cooling and power hardware to support the faster mechanical drive.

Hybrid really does make sense, but not like this!

[Terje Mathisen]

I have seen research that I believe in which basically states that a hybrid drive can provide equivalent performance to a pure SSD solution, with capacity equal to a regular drive, but only if you have enough flash memory available:

The crucial point corresponds to about 5% of the total capacity, so a 500 GB disk like the new Seagate would require at least 25 GB of flash (which probably means 32 GB), instead of the very paltry 8 GB they are delivered with.

The only real advantage here compared to the previous model ( I have a 750 GB/8 GB hybrid disk in this laptop) seems to be the inclusion of write caching, I can personally attest that with a pretty much full drive, having just 1% flash cache doesn't seem to deliver any noticeable improvements compared to the same drive without the flash memory.

Terje

use the cloud man

[cheekyboy]

Unless a 200 nukes hit usa, then who cares what you had on disk, your toast.

Between google/MS/apple/dropbox + others, you can amass a combo of 30gig + easy.

Buy a chromebook and get even more.

Yes, I too am pissed at crap HDs that die in 12months, or if even idle (power off) for more than a few hours, suddenly die when powered on.

My SSDs for OS's have been going well for more than 18 months.

I always replace laptops with 7200s

[cheekyboy]

Each time I got a new laptop, i replaced the 5400's with 7200 XT's hybrids, and I never noticed a battery reduction, you might even get more cache hits, and reduce disk access seeks thus reduce power.

For big TBs, i would assume 7200s to be made of better quality than 5400s, as googles experience goes, the heat is not such of a big issue.

Re:I always replace laptops with 7200s

[TsuruchiBrian]

you replaced regular 5400 rpm drives with 7200 rpm hybrid drives? Did you ever try comparing power usage of regular 5400 vs. 7200, or hybrid 5400 and hybrid 7200?

why would 7200 rpm drives be better quality?

every laptop has room for 2 DISKS

[cheekyboy]

every laptop, not including mini netbooks, have a DISK, and SATA DVD, which no one uses dvd any more. So if you can suffer, you can pull out the DVD, and replace that with a SSD in a dvd shapped box.

Then you can keep your internal HD + have a cheap 64-128g SSD.