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Hybrid Hard Drives Just Need 8GB of NAND
judgecorp writes "Research from Seagate suggests that hybrid hard drives in general use are virtually as good as solid state drives if they have just 8GB of solid state memory. The research found that normal office computers, not running data-centric applications, access just 9.58GB of unique data per day. 8GB is enough to store most of that, and results in a drive which is far cheaper than an all-Flash device. Seagate is confident enough to ease off on efforts to get data off hard drives quickly, and rely on cacheing instead. It will cease production of 7200 RPM laptop drives at the end of 2013, and just make models running at 5400 RPM."
No chance this is just the company saying this because they missed the boat on solid state drives?
The games I download from Steam are around 5GB each. So if I try playing two games in one day, only the first one will load quickly?
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I seldom see one. Seems pretty lame as a promise. Stop making 7200 RPM desktop drives, and I'll find the claims made here to be a bit more of a confidence indicator.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
... all solid state in my laptop. I hate hybrids.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I guess a 5400 spins down regularly, but you know, do these things go in portable devices?
Seems to me they'll be ssd'ing for the most part into the future.
Are hybrid drives working well on Linux yet? Last I checked, support for hybrid SSDs was still in its infancy.
What do you mean "missed boat"? Almost all PCs still ship with HDDs and I'm sure a lot of customers (both consumers and OEMs) are interested in hybrid solutions too.
seagate research suggest seagate bargains are good! how amazing!
hybrid drives blow, I guess better than nothing but no comparison to ssd. that 8 gigs isn't the same every day or if it is then the machine is acting pretty much just as a terminal and not moving media around etc(yes there was a time I could get by with a 3.2gbyte fireball, but that was long ago now).
excuse me as I go to do a simple drag'n'drop to my bigger hd drive. hybirds would be nice, IF they slapped 128gbytes+2tbytes on it and somehow it understood that there's no need to move the video file I'm viewing to the the ssd portion ever.
just playing two different games would outrun 8gbyte ssd portion... heck, max payne 3 was something like 30 gigs and one session of gaming probably accesses 8 gigs easily and it would be nice to have the os on the ssd portion..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
"640K software is all the memory anybody would ever need on a computer." - Bill Gates (Not Really: http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1997/01/1484)
No chance this is just the company saying this because they missed the boat on solid state drives?
Or because 5400 rpm drives are much cheaper to produce, not requiring nearly as stringent tolerance levels as 7200/10k/15k rpm drives?
What's certain is that the worst case times will increase, and that's when people get irritated. It's easier to live with slower overall than it is to live with faster overall, but much slower at times. That will stand out like a sore thumb, and be a source of irritation.
This looks like Seagate desperately clinging to their old bastion. Even Western Digital bit the bullet and started working on pure SSDs. The problem with Seagate's calculations is that there'll come a time (not that far into the future) where NAND will be cheap enough to get a full SSD for only a moderate price hike over a HDD, all while getting all the benefits of a pure SSD drive. They risk getting left behind by clinging to the hybrid drive idea.
No chance this is just the company saying this because they missed the boat on solid state drives?
Given that Seagate makes HDDs and has little or no Flash fabrication capacity, they were obviously going to include an HDD in the plan (and, given the price, so will a lot of buyers). They don't have an obvious bias (other than a general desire for 'less, because that keeps costs low') in terms of how much NAND cache is needed to see meaningful improvements.
I'd be inclined to distrust flimflam to the effect that 'Sure, hard drives are just as good as SSDs!'; but have no particular reason to doubt that 8GB, rather than 4, or 12, or 16, or 5, or 32, is the approximate amount of flash needed, if that is what they report.
Honest question: how do hybrid drives compare to traditional HDDs when it comes to wear? To they tend to fail more (less) often / die faster (live longer) than traditional drives? What about pure SSDs?
Yeah. That's great.
Until you burn through that dinky little 8GB due to heavy read/write.
Then what? You now have a 5400 rpm hard drive.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Since 1992 or so, 1st using separate HDDs (slower seek/access by FAR) & then using software ramdisks per the list below (on a MS-DDK based one I wrote in fact, on how I apply them):
Then applying Software-Based Ramdrives to database work with EEC Systems/SuperSpeed.com on paid contract (which did me VERY WELL @ both Windows IT Pro magazine in reviews, & also MS TechEd 2000-2002 in its hardest category: SQLServer Performance Enhancement & SuperSpeed.com too - since I improved their wares efficacy by up to 40% via programmatic control & tuning programs for them) - which, only the past few years now it seems, OTHERS are finally "latching onto" for performance purposes in database work in industrial environs! The EEC/SuperSpeed.com unit had 1 great thing going for it - mirroring back to HDD to save state of data!)
I move the following off my wd Velociraptor sata II 10,000 rpm 16mb buffered harddisks that are driven off a Promise Ex-8350 128mb ECC ram caching raid sata 1/2 controller (which defers/delays writes via said cache, & also lessens physical head movement on disks & this is where I am going to make it even faster via lessening its workloads, read on & reduces fragmentation as well in the same stroke - "bonus") onto my 4gb DDR2 Gigabyte IRAM PCIExpress ramdisk card:
A.) Pagefile.sys (partition #1 1gb size, rest is on 3gb partition next - this I didn't do on SSD though)
B.) OS & App level logging (EventLogs + App Logging)
C.) WebBrowser caches, histories, sessions & browsers too
D.) Print Spooling
E.) %Temp% ops (OS & user level temp ops environmental variable values alterations)
F.) %Tmp% ops (OS & user level temp ops environmental variable values alterations)
G.) %Comspec% (command interpreter location, cmd.exe in this case, & in DOS/Win9x years before, command.com also)
H.) Lastly - I also place my custom hosts file onto it, via redirecting where it's referenced by the OS, here in the registry (for performance AND security):
HKLM\system\CurrentControlSet\services\Tcpip\Parameters
(Specifically altering the "DataBasePath" parameter there which also acts more-or-less, like a *NIX shadow password system also!)
* All of which lessen the amount of work my "main" OS & programs slower mechanical hard disks have to do, "speeding them up" by lessening their workload, fragmentation, and speeding up access/seek latency for the things in the list above too.
APK
P.S.=> HDD's concentrate on program &/or data fetches that are still hdd bound (& not kernelmode diskcaching subsystem cached in 4gb of DDR3 system ram here either yet) done on a media that has no heads to move, & thus, more mechanical latency + slower seek/access as you get on hard disks + reduced filesystem fragmentations due to that all, also & it works!
... apk
When I was buying a new laptop hard drive I got a hybrid drive but not before some research. The 7200RPM Momentus XT mops the floor with their 5400rpm new generation of hybrid drive. The performance increase on their 5400rpm drives is insignificant, it was not even worth considering but I at least found stock of the Momentus XT which *IS* well worth considering and ordered TWO. I took into account cost, capacity and performance when choosing the drives. For the cost/performance the 5400rpm drives did not deliver but it had the capacity, the Momentus XT delivered on cost/performance and was only slightly lacking in capacity. Pure SSD drive only delivered on performance which in my case wasn't weighted enough in my process to justify. If the Momentus XT didn't exist I'd have just stuck with a 7200rpm drive.
So RIP Seagate's worth while mobile HDD's. Unless you've fixed the mediocre performance in your 5400rpm drives I'll either be doing full SSD or just buying somebody else's 7200rpm drive.
Why bother adding 8 gig of solid state storage to your hard disk when you could just add 8 gigs of RAM and use that for disk cache?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
call me when SSD drives come in 1TB sizes and are affordable
my macbook HD died and i bought one of these seagate drives with 8GB flash for the 1TB model. $130 including tax at newegg and best buy.
nice speed difference too. SSD is faster but i don't really care since most of my computing is done on my iphone and ipad
I had a Seagate Momentus XT (750 GB hybrid) and I replaced it with a Samsung 750 GB SSD. The pure SSD solution is noticeably faster in all respects, especially in boot up, and this is with a machine now using Truecrypt whole disk encyption (wasn't using it on the Momentus).
The Momentus was a good upgrade until SSDs in the size I wanted were reasonably priced, but performance wise it isn't in the same league as a SSD.
The hybrid SSD solution really shows its weakness when you deviate from "normal" behavior, and this can be anything from an application upgrade, running Windows updates, or accessing stuff you don't use that much. Performance just seems back to dismal levels and I suspect that it takes a while for the cache to re-optimize if the deviating disk activity is at all intensive.
I think the hybrid concept is interesting, but I think you need more cache and a way to optimize the cache not just not most recently accessed blocks but for the operating system and applications in use, too.
I'd never buy a Seagate hard drive ever.
Every single one of them has failed horribly. Every single person I have known has had them fail horribly on them.
But never the same for any other drive from any other company.
The company can die for all I care. Scrubs of the industry.
As long as the most regularly libraries and executables are cached, it shouldn't seem slow.. for other files, you only need to wait when they're opened initially. I don't even really notice when I open documents over a wi-fi link, so I don't see why opening documents from a 5,400RPM HDD should be much worse.
which is totally what she said
If you're playing Max Payne on an office computer... lol
"A.) Pagefile.sys (partition #1 1gb size, rest is on 3gb partition next - this I didn't do on SSD though)" -
CORRECTION = "this I didn't do on software-based ramdrives though"
* :)
Only reason? I didn't have enough excess RAM in my systems to pull it off is why! That was the ONLY reason along with the fact that the 1st DDK based RamDrive software I used, was my own:
http://www.google.com/#bav=on.2,or.r_qf.&fp=4b498971aefdff90&psj=1&q=%22APK+RamDisk%22
(Was limited - Fat 12 floppy filesystem 32mb size limited iirc & that's what you have to redo/overcome to create "unlimited size" ones, especially in today's 64-bit environs being predominant)...
However - it CAN be done though, via EEC systems/SuperSpeed.com (& now certainly with 64-bit software ramdrives as well) or others that used MS Windows bootup RAM range exclusions (provided you have TON of ram that is to start with).
I prefer doing pagefiles on my Gigabyte IRAM (just as I did on CENATEK's rocketdrive for years before it), to offset seek/access being slower on HDD's, less fragmentations of the HDD's filesystems, & also of course, separated from HDD's creates less "head movements" for paging too... it works.
APK
P.S.=> Need more "consciousness fuel" today I think (coffee)...
... apk
Yeah, but typical office PCs are already plenty fast for the things they typically do, so they aren't in need of a big boost. That's why PC manufacturers have been concentrating on making them smaller and cheaper rather than more powerful. It's those data sensitive applications that are atypical of office PCs that are the market for high performance drives.
Besides, if you only need 9.5 GB of unique data per day, you're probably better off upgrading your RAM rather than your hard drive. The stuff you access most will get cached, and you'll have plenty of memory on the odd chance you ever do need to do something that requires a lot.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
You don't make sense. They're reporting the approximate amount of flash needed for the hard drives to become just as good as SSDs, so if you don't believe that the end goal is possible, then you shouldn't believe how they propose to reach it, unless they report putting 2T of flash in a 2T hard drive.
I'm sure their claims are completely accurate.
However you have to look at the qualifiers. They've determined that 8gb is enough for office work with non-data centric applications.
In other words, if you don't need an SSD than a hybrid with an 8GB cache will do. Which should have been pretty obvious.
Yup, they missed the boat. Anyone who has used a SSD will go back to using a regular HD when they stop making SSDs, and the last available one breaks.
SSDs really are the bee's knees.
I am John Hurt.
Round up to 10GB. So in 2 weeks (10 working days) that's an additional 100GB stored locally.
In 20 weeks you've filled up a 1TB drive.
What kind of office (aside from video production) works like that? The ones I know of, most of the machines are used to check email, do data entry on one or two database apps, surf, maybe create some documents or spreadsheets which are then stored on the file server. Other than the database apps, that's less than a couple of megabytes per person per day. And other than temp files, NONE of it should be stored on the local machine.
And if your average user is caching 10GB of temp files then you have a problem with your apps.
It seems that the word "hybrid" is being redefined in common use. It is now being used to combine one old outdated thing that needs to be put out to pasture with a new state-of-the-art idea.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Man, tell me I'm not the only one who still remembers a time when 8 Gb of RAM was a REALLY big deal. I still only have 8 Gb in my gaming computer and 6 in my laptop. Maybe I'm just old.
In other words...if you are conditioned to using a 5400 RPM HD, then the spinup / access times seem normal to you. If you've had better, and for only a few dollars difference (7200 RPM) or more (SSD), then it's the difference between getting something done, then getting your morning coffee, versus making a doughnut run, as your machine will still be loading up the desktop by the time you get back.
The thing is...while you may be conditioned, as well as others, to believe this slow access time is 'normal'...the rest of the world, that has upgraded, will just continue on without you. It took your sales guys 15 minutes to log into their desktops...my guys logged in in 3 minutes, and are already making their second or third calls. My guys have the potential to do a little more volume, in the same time, than your guys...and the cost to my business would be minimal (who cares about saving $80, when the sales guy is bring in a contract worth many times that amount, even accounting for costs?).
I am John Hurt.
What's also certain is that with hybrid drives you get the slow read speed of a 5400 rpm, the mechanical disadvantage of a fragile rotating platter, and the catastrophic (read: total) data loss when SSD's fail.
No thanks. The money savings vs. buying a true SSD is not worth the extra complexity, slower read times, and potential for failure. If I am going to accept the risk of a SSD failure, it better be fast - through and through!
I can't wait until flash memory becomes so inexpensive that it becomes standard to have built in RAID arrays for redundancy and speed right in the HDD itself.
Yup, they missed the boat. Anyone who has used a SSD will go back to using a regular HD when they stop making SSDs, and the last available one breaks.
SSDs really are the bee's knees.
Well, qualified, they are are the knees of bees.
I have a Samsung which likes to give me read errors on boot up, after a try or two it gets its act together. Tried another one and the same effect. Samsung's tech support on this is nearly as good as staring at a wall of drying paint. (If anyone has a recommendation on the best, meaning most reliable 250GB or more SSD, please feel free to pass it along)
If you don't have most of your stuff stored via a library or other link on an NSA or server and SSD would be preferable, but if you're only needing to boot up an SSD is probably a bit more than you need, though the low capacity drives are approaching the price of low capacity mechanical memory. Soon I expect most new personal data devices (i.e. PC/Mac) will all by using SSDs.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Due to 'memory pressure' that "forces the hand" of their aging algorithm(s) alongside the kernelmode memory mgt. subsystem(s) might be why, under such circumstances in their "queue-like" design. I.E.-> When an app demands a large section of RAM, & then actually WRITES it can cause that. Hardware 'caches' (@ least how I use them -> http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4068409&cid=44509763 ), don't. So, I used the technique(s) noted in that link instead to 'offload', & speedup (by lessening the HDD fragmentations + workload) my HDD's, hardware cached too (for deferred writes mostly) notwithstanding.
APK
P.S.=> Imo @ least: Seagate doing this "boosting of cachesize" on HDD's, especially if they're ones with intelligent aging algorithms (vs. dumb buffers only) is a good idea that'll probably work well for performance, & keep std mechanical disks around a while longer (vs. SSD) - imo, HDD's will eventually become backup devices (for reliability keeping state, & making them FASTER for that certainly doesn't hurt either, by doing what Seagate's up to)... apk
As long as the most regularly libraries and executables are cached, it shouldn't seem slow.. for other files, you only need to wait when they're opened initially. I don't even really notice when I open documents over a wi-fi link, so I don't see why opening documents from a 5,400RPM HDD should be much worse.
With that logic, we should all go back to 56k modems because its only slow the first time you load the webpage...right?
You're assuming that "opening documents" is the bottleneck where people can get irritated. It isn't. It's more likely to be when you need to do some large operations. For a home user, that might be scanning an MP3 collection or several thousand photos. Or copying something big from a thumbdrive.
For an office user, that might be when IT runs an AV or compliance scan, or your VM saves a snapshot, or you archive Outlook.
In either case, it's the worst case times that irritate users. Not the normal opening of documents.
It isn't just the convenience and speed of solid-state. It's that it's more than enough space for most people. Unless you have hundred of movies, you have plenty for your needs.
If it wasn't in that range, it would still be just a novelty for bleeding edge users or some server applications.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Very few people need 1TB on a laptop. Have a large external disk at home, and a smaller SSD in the laptop.
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
I've used an SSD. Works great for my laptop and router, don't care for it for my desktop largely due to price. For $60, I can get an 80GB SSD or I can get a 2TB HDD. That 80GB SSD is going to require an additional HDD anyway for storage for many people.
Most consumers are still going to go with cheapest and, outside of the tech-oriented crowd, don't really care if they have to wait an extra few seconds. As far as I'm concerned, the SSD boat is still boarding passengers and is no where close to leaving just yet. Once SSD prices are more competitive with hard drives (which could be another decade or two at the least), then you can say that ship has sailed. Until then, cost will trump performance for the largest markets.
Probably worse: you have a 5400rpm non-functional drive. I very much doubt they've integrated a failsafe which bypasses the NAND cache if it gets exhausted. More likely the performance will worsen as the healthy NAND decreases in size until it's zero.
I have the following concerns with hybrid drives.
1: After a new build or reimage (remember they are talking about office users here and offices do reimage from time to time) how long will it take the system to settle down and work out what should be on hdd and what should be on flash. There is obviously a compromise here between speed of adapting to a changed usage pattern and wear on the flash.
2: what will happen with writes? large SSDs spread them over a large area of flash to get decent life. Will writes be forced to the hard drive or will they rapidly wear the small ammount of flash.
3: for the ammount of storage a typical office user needs will they really be all that much cheaper than just fitting a SSD and avoiding the fragility of a mechanical hard drive and the unpredictability of a caching soloution.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
No. Most will just think "Windows is slow again." Or maybe "Damn antivirus."
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Their approximation is taken from a dark place...located below the belt line.
In other words, that number is crap. It's shows a divine lack of future planning for capacity...and a stoic belief that, contrary to all historical evidence, applications and operating systems will not continue to grow in size. Assuming a ROI of at least 3 years, perhaps 5 years for some machines...you're looking at at least one major OS upgrade, possibly two, which tend be larger with each iteration; additionally, individual applications are likely to undergo new versions, which will add new features, requiring more space.
But more importantly, the cost difference between adding a SSD, or SSD + second HD combo, to any machine, is rather minimal. It's so trivial, provided you buy from the right suppliers, and your business is not on the chopping block, that it warrants not further discussion.
I am John Hurt.
This. Keep most of your data on a nice big RAID array, that gets backups each night. Let the laptop have an nice fast SSD.
i just saw a SanDisk Cruzer 32 GB USB Flash Drive for $20 USD. I have most of my photos on an 8 GB thumb drive. oh wait, this article is talking about hybrid drives. nevermind. Windows 8 and some office programs will barely fit on a 32 GB flash drive anyways.
My laptop is now 7 years old. In that time, I've made three major upgrades to it.
1) Moving from XP Pro to Win 7 Ultimate
2) Upgrading from a 5400rpm to a 7200rpm drive (only other major difference between drives was capacity)
3) Upgrading from 1GB RAM to 2.5GB RAM
As far as day-to-day performance goes, the hard drive upgrade made the most noticeable difference. The RAM upgrade is great for the relatively rare moments that I have a lot of stuff open on my laptop (it's not my primary computer) and Windows 7 certainly sped things up overall, but not as much as the HDD upgrade.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148696
960GB SSD...not quite 1TB, but close enough. And all for $600, provided you can find a place that can keep them in stock.
And for someone sporting a MacBook, iPhone, and iPad, I don't think the price will exactly send you into sticker shock.
I am John Hurt.
Wake me up when I can get multi-TB SSDs at an affordable price.
For most people, regular HDDs are better. Not to mention quite a bit cheaper. I use one of my for backup, and that many write-erase cycles would be murder on an SSD. What's more, getting an 2TB SSD would be rather challenging.
For static pages, yes, that's basically true. The difference here is that the vast majority of files on your PC are static with relatively few files changing regularly. Web pages usually have a fair bit of dynamic content that changes every time you view the page (not to mention streaming media). Obviously it's not true of everyone, but we're talking about *most* people; *most* people rely on streaming/web for a good majority of what used to require large files.
Intel 330 Series 2.5" 180GB SATA 6Gb/s Solid State Drives
Not really, you're talking about the difference between a couple seconds and 10-15 minutes.
Or that Windows just set the drive into PIO mode because of one too many UDMA errors. Even when the disk itself is perfectly fine.
.... too slow to do backups with if you have any sizable amount of data at all. Mirroring SSD's saves huge amount of time in cost and fiddling in terms of backing up important data.
Hard drives are really for huge libraries of stuff you want to keep but dont use often and dont mind slow backups on because they are of lower relative importance (movies, games ,etc).
Uh huh. So where do I store all my steam games, video files that I like to work on, etc.?
On my NAS you say? Sweet, now if I could only get good speeds across that VPN link to my house from the airport or my hotel, or killing time in an unused training room on my break.
You're assuming that most people do that anymore. I'm the only one in my circle of friends who still maintains an mp3 collection (which is on a file server anyway). Everyone else either stores the files on their phone/mp3 player or, more commonly, streams the media. Likewise with photos, most people store them online now. Besides, how often do you actually look at those photos? We're talking everyday usage, not Aunt-Bertha-Is-In-Town-For-Her-Yearly-Visit usage. Likewise for an office user, any competent IT department is hopefully running performance-damaging scans during off-peak hours and relatively few people run VMs from a laptop. The key here is *most* people, not *every* person.
If you don't have most of your stuff stored via a library or other link on an NSA or server . . .
Wait a sec . . . How do you access all of your data at the NSA? do they offer a subscription service or something?
I don't agree with that. I like to have the ability to back up my data on the laptop. Now, granted it's not a true back up as you're still risking a disk failure, but for the more common things like fat fingering and filesystem corruption, it's perfectly fine.
Also, of that 1TB disk, you really only get to use about 750GB or so of it, when you factor in for the different units, leaving the 20% free and leaving space to restore things. Then when you account for the back up space, you're probably talking about only 250GB or so of space.
For things where you're going to have to wait a few minutes anyway, an extra few minutes isn't really an issue as you'd already be going to get a coffee or check Slashdot or whatever. If it's on the order of seconds, then waiting a few extra seconds isn't a big deal either. Well, that's my preference anyway, maybe yours is different..
which is totally what she said
Having RAID on the drive itself mostly defeats the purpose of RAID (excepting RAID 0, but even that has issues with this approach). RAID is best for combating downtime due to hardware failure. By sticking both "disks" of a RAID-1 on one drive, you have no recourse if one of those "disks" fails. You can't swap out half a drive to let it rebuild on a good 'disk'.
My suggestion is to simply buy more RAM. With 16 GB of RAM there are 10 GB for disk cache and 6 GB for everything else. This sounds like it matches Seagate's usage pattern pretty well. It should be cheaper and RAM can be written endlessly, so it should be more reliable. The only downside is it must refill its cache if you reboot. Gamers might opt for 32 GB if they can find a system with that much.
Ray Seyfarth, ray.seyfarth@gmail.com, http://rayseyfarth.blogspot.com
I have the suspicion that Seagate is planning quite specifically; but just don't care all that much.
The majority of orders will, presumably, be from OEMs looking to stuff HDD slots on the cheap, while still complying with the Win8 hardware certification requirements(most notably, resume in under 2 seconds) and possibly Intel's "ultrabook" requirements, which have their own I/O demands.
I suspect that Seagate's calculations of 'How cheaply can we build a drive that will satisfy the letter of the requirements that our customers need to meet?" were made with care, and aren't crap at all. They're just something of a lie if you expect that level of performance to be maintained under more stressful loads.
Get an SSD. You'll be surprised.
Thats what Network Storage is for. SSDs are meant to be treated like a hot rod. Hot and fast, but burns out faster. Still worth it.
Good-bye
Have the results been independently replicated? Were details of the benchmarking methodology published anywhere?
You weren't dealing with 500GB platters in the 7 year old 5400RPM drive. Not quite apples to apples. But Seagate going with an SSD portion that's barely bigger than today's RAM upgrades seems silly.
Samsung 840 Pro series
The part I find interesting is that Intel-SRT (basically using a separate SSD as a cache) won't work with less than a 20GB SSD. When developing SRT, Intel determined that 20-60GB is the appropriate range for caching, so it won't work with 20GB and will ignore capacity beyond 60GB.
Two areas where this argument likely falls apart are (#1) if you have a function that uses a lot of RAM that in turn needs to get paged out to disk and (#2) if you're doing virtualization of most modern operating systems (then again, this is kind of a recursion on #1...)
I'd buy the 8GB is enough for basic needs today... but that amount likely will go up with time.
Why do you need to store ALL your Steam games? Valve makes backing up and reloading games trivial.
Good-bye
If I want a decent HDD setup, I get two with the longest warranty from WD. I've been doing this for the last decade. It's cheap and the setup always works.
If I want an SSD setup, I have no idea where to begin. Everyone says SSDs are faster, but no one says they've found them to be more reliable. Nor do I have consensus on a company which I can be confident about going to each time I want a system drive. Specs and prices seem to vary wildly in a way they don't for more mature HDD tech.
So, I currently have a 2 TB WD Black system drive - what do I replace it with?
Not really, you're talking about the difference between a couple seconds and 10-15 minutes.
10-15 minutes?!
Back in your day to load each webpage, did they deliver each bit by abacus via horseback? :P
> SSDs really are the bee's knees.
Depends on the brand really. Both performance and quality vary widely. For some use cases, the performance of an SSD might not even beat a cheap spinny disk.
So fixating on a narrow definition of typically is really extraordinarily stupid.
Seagate is just trying to be cheap and spinning this into the usual "geeks are irrelevant" kind of nonsense you usually see from Apple fanboys.
Also, the whole hybrid drive thing is a manifestation of just how terribly overpriced SSD drives are right now and how laptops typically are unable to accomodate 2 hard drives (one for speed and one for space).
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Having RAID on the drive itself mostly defeats the purpose of RAID (excepting RAID 0, but even that has issues with this approach). RAID is best for combating downtime due to hardware failure. By sticking both "disks" of a RAID-1 on one drive, you have no recourse if one of those "disks" fails. You can't swap out half a drive to let it rebuild on a good 'disk'.
I was thinking more like RAID 5 or other models with redundancy, just in the same housing. HEY! don't be stealing my idea lol.
That doesn't actually follow the logic of the conversation at all.
For an internet analogy, it would be more like having a gigabit fibre link to your favourite websites so that they load instantly. Downloading new files sequentially would also be quite fast. But if you tried to download multiple files simultaneously, you'd start having degraded performance.
which is totally what she said
why do you need 1tb locally? I have a 512GB SSD on my macbook, it is *more* than enough. Another 6tb is just 802.11n away, and considering thats usually streamed content...
Hating good technology why?
Who would say that? Anyone who even knows those terms would know that we've moved away from IDE emulation to native AHCI mode many years ago.
They dont blow. My momentus XT boots much quicker then a normal HDD. THey were a good idea if everyone had ran with it during this stop gap period. NOw the end is in sight.
Good-bye
> For a home user, that might be scanning an MP3 collection or several thousand photos. Or copying something big from a thumbdrive.
None of these are interactive operations. They are what you might call "batch jobs". They are not things that anyone expects to do in real time.
The real issue is concurrency. Can a single spindle handle everything you want to do with it? We have 4 and 8 core desktop computers and our storage hasn't become any more parallel. A single disk has become a bottleneck.
Just adding a 2nd piece of spinning rust can address concurrency issues quite nicely. You don't necessarily need the most expensive solution available.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Samsung 840 Pro series
That's the bunny I'm having trouble with. When it works, it's great, but these 'data read errors' on boot are not a reassuring thing.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
If you don't have most of your stuff stored via a library or other link on an NSA or server . . .
Wait a sec . . . How do you access all of your data at the NSA? do they offer a subscription service or something?
Fumble fingers - meant to type NAS.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Why won't Anonymous Cowards show their research to back up their claims?
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Not entirely missed the boat. They never had the opportunity to join.
The SSD companies are the old memory companies. The HDD doesn't have the factories or the know-how. When they make hybrid disks they buy flash memories from someone else and add them to their drives.
One of the reasons you hear so much FUD regarding SSDs is that the HDD makers are afraid to be out-competed by a product type they can't make.
Heck, if the HDD manufacturers even know how many/few write cycles their disks could handle I suspect that it would be even lower than that of SSDs.
Hybrid drive may be nice and all but they do nothing to make the drive survive longer in laptops/mobile devices and for the stationary desktop it only seems like a way for traditional drive manufacturers to stay relevant for one decade longer.
I still don't think HDDs will be the standard in ten years.
I'm not conditioned to think like that at all. In fact all my primary machines for the last 3 or so years have had SSDs as their primary drives, and even the cheap Dell laptops I just bought to use as terminals apparently have 7,200RPM HDDs in them.
The whole point here is that your sales guys would boot much faster into Windows with an SSD cache (though actually if they just chose to hibernate their machines instead of rebooting then it wouldn't be a big deal). Sales call guys would get by fine even with 16 or 32GB SSDs anyway..
which is totally what she said
I'd consider paying $115 for a 750GB 5400 with an 80GB SSD cache.
More if it were from a reputable company with a good warranty and the ability to tweak the caching algorithm from any OS using open-source drivers.*
*Note: I would require a "no drivers? no problem" fallback to block-level caching, or I wouldn't buy it at all.
.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Intel 330 Series 2.5" 180GB SATA 6Gb/s Solid State Drives
Too small, trying to replace a 250GB SATA 6. Currently on Samsung 840 Pro and that's what is giving me 'data read errors' on boot, two independent systems. Might be they are just not compatible with the controller. Some scribblings indicate the timing of the SSD is throwing the the controller, and there's now way to adjust settings with Samsung's SSD tools.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Then he's probably working someplace nice...
I am John Hurt.
Seagate is just trying to be cheap and spinning this into the usual "geeks are irrelevant" kind of nonsense you usually see from Apple fanboys.
Ouch.... the cognitive dissonance there makes my head hurt.
Apple cares a lot about geeks, particularly geeks with fat wallets and a lust for shiny hardware.
*seductive whisper* retina display...
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
So if I stick with 5400 RPM hard drives, I get doughnuts?
Let's say you play at most four games _regularly_. That's 20-30 GB. It's also nice to sometimes open an old one and play for an hour or two, so let's round it up to 50GB. Add 20GB for the system, some music and movies and you're still not even close to 256GB. Now, 256GB SSDs are about twice the price of a 1TB rotating disk, but you get the benefit of faster everything.
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
Why do you need to store ALL your Steam games? Valve makes backing up and reloading games trivial.
Not everyone can afford to download 10 to 20 GB per day. I would never have considered that approach with my previous ISP.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
"Back in your day to load each webpage, did they deliver each bit by abacus via horseback?"
Isn't that how YouTube does it since Google bought them?
Of course! Seagate's study finds that the hybrid devices Seagate (and nobody else) makes are all that anyone will ever need. Nobody needs those pesky SSD drives (that Seagate don't make much profit on, and where they have a huge number of competitors).
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
They aren't claiming that 8GB flash makes the drive as good as SSDs. They are only claiming that it will be equivalent for most users.
If most users only use the computer to boot the OS and start the browser then I don't doubt that claim at all, but then they can just install the OS on an 8GB SSD (Or 30GB if you can't find anything smaller.) and skip the HDD part entirely.
Most of my laptop users do access the same 8GBs every day. That includes the OS and programs. Unless you're saying you boot to a different OS every day and rarely use email/browser/office software regularly? I don't think you understand the difference between "most users" and "a few niche cases"
"Or because 5400 rpm drives are much cheaper to produce, not requiring nearly as stringent tolerance levels as 7200/10k/15k rpm drives?"
Besides... according to OP this is on "most computers". What if you are a developer, or edit video for a living?
Looks to me like Seagate is going to give up that market to WD and others.
I'm still leery about SSDs unless I have some type of constant, ongoing backup mechanism to more reliable (and slower) media. A HDD can be recovered. A dead optical disk might be able to give something with how the pits are magnetized (in the case of MO), or how they are colored (in the case of CDs/DVDs/BD media). May not be able to pull everything, but magnetic fields can be discerned and something decoded. A SSD with all the electronics squirted out the gates isn't going to be able to be coaxed to divulge anything, no matter how much persuasion is done.
Most people need more than what a cheap SSD can provide.
The gap between SSD and spinny disk when it comes to storage capacities is beyond absurd. This leads to a 1TB spinny drive being cheaper than small SSD drives.
So if you have a non-trivial amount of music or photos, an SSD probably isn't going to cut it. The same goes for any sort of gaming to speak of. The SSD drive just won't have enough space.
Many SSD drives are still smaller than the hard drive I had in my laptop in 2002 and are more comparable to what people have on their PHONES and tablets now.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Let's put it this way... when we were all using serial-line IP, loading a web page in NCSA Mosaic usually meant watching while the images progressively rendered as they were still being downloaded. And you often were stuck waiting for one to render in excruciating useless detail before the next one would even start to show the lowest quality rendition.
You make your raid your storage and use the SSD as a system drive. I have tried a few different SSDs, and the stuff from Intel, or Corsair, or really any well know memory manufacturer works great. I have not experienced any issues with installing an OS on the drives as long as you dont try to use XP or VIsta you should be good. WIn 7, 8, 2008, and Linux all account for the drives well with no configuration needed.
Just read the reviews. You can get a good 256GB for about 200 dollars.
SSD's are great, yes, but there are still too big problems with them.
1) Capacity and price. HDD are still significantly cheaper per GB and get up to 4TB per drive. Its a hard sell to offer a computer with only 128 GB or 256 GB of system storage when you can also find ones with 3 to 4 TB of storage.
2) SSD's are still using HDD technology. While SSD offer better performance than HDD, really SSD should be offering performance on par with RAM rather than physical spinning disk media. While come companies like Apple are hooking SSD directly to the PCI E bus, I would expect that a drive made of up solid state chips to perform more like RAM rather than really just being slightly faster than HDD.
I'm not saying I want HDD over SSD, but I mean I've been around long enough to know when SSDs were first promised as the "next great thing" and still greatly disappointed at the state they are in today.
I think the whole SSD industry dropped the ball as I have never seen an industry innovate at such as snails pace. SSD is a card full of chips, its not rocket science, and yet SSD still have read/write rate of decay, performance is not on par with RAM and prices are still ridiculous.
Now compare to the HDD industry? They exceeded perceived limitations on the amount of storage per inch of platter several times now. I mean this has been SIGNIFICANT feats of engineering to squeeze out more bit density and I mean they even moved to stacking bits vertically on the medium.
I don't know, there is no reason why we don't have Terabyte SSD's that cost $50 and rival RAM in speed today except that the SSD industry has either been unwilling to bring us this technology at this price point OR grossly incompetent to not be able to deliver the goods.
For now, if you can put 8 GB of cache into a 4 TB hard drive and deliver me comparable speeds to SSD for less money, I think this is a huge win for Seagate over all the negative bashing you all are giving them.
When SSD grows up and start matching HDD on price/capacity or delivering me speeds that make RAM obsolete, let me know, for now this has been an over-promised and underwhelming technology.
Also will people please stop assuming this is the same as "we only need 640k of RAM" or "only 9GB!" statement. Its retarded. They are not claiming that people only need 8 GB of storage in total but that on average on any given day, people are only accessing roughly 8 GB of storage so cache that much and give people high performance of SSD without the stupid expense of them, and yet still have terabytes of storage to access from.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Apple cares a lot about geeks, particularly geeks with fat wallets and a lust for shiny hardware.
*seductive whisper* retina display...
Exactly. Best laptop (possibly computer) I've ever bought.
You can backup and recover to local media like a flash drive. I have a 300 GB softcap and I still do local recovery and backup of my steam games to shuffle them around my 180 GB SSD
Good-bye
Windows 7 with updates will eat through 16 GB's immediately. Even 32 GB wouldn't last long with a modest amount of files. I can't imagine that even sales people could get by on less than 64 GB.
Fumble fingers - meant to type NAS.
Sure you did.
> 960GB SSD...not quite 1TB, but close enough. And all for $600, provided you can find a place that can keep them in stock.
I can get 3 4TB spinny disks for that.
Push those 3 drives at their top speed and they might not quite keep up with with the SSD but your average users probably won't be able to tell the difference.
I own a laptop that will run circles around a MacBook and I still didn't spring for a large SSD.
$600 is an entire other tablet, the opportunity cost of being stupid about how you spend your money.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Thats why only the OS should be kept there, user programs and content should be kept on the HDD as usual, also the OS needs to keep the pagefile and the registry on the HDD too.
because seagate doesn't own fabs that produce flash chips and they're at the whim of the market when it comes to procurement of them.
at 8 measly gigabytes, just put some ddr3 on the drive as a read only (and optional write back) cache. fuck ssd.
Yup, they missed the boat. Anyone who has used a SSD will go back to using a regular HD when they stop making SSDs, and the last available one breaks.
First, a quick disclaimer: I have not used an SSD. I think they are still overpriced for what they are and that they are just not worth it.
Anyway, I have a hard time believing that after I've tried an SSD, I won't go back. Are you seriously saying that for pure data storage (ie. speed is NOT a consideration), SSDs are the way to go? I mean, I can understand using one in a laptop (for shock resistance) or as a small main system drive in a desktop, with a second drive--a HDD--for data storage. Also, don't forget--setting swap space on one of those things might end up breaking your expensive new toy.
Also, I'll wait for the "early adopters" with more money than brains to do the beta testing... I'm sure there's plenty of things we just don't know about these things yet. I've already heard some negative things about them that contradict the stories of pure rosy perfection that people originally claimed of these storage devices. Meanwhile, if I ever find one cheap (SLC for reliability) I might pick it up for a system drive, but until then (and even for a while after, once SSDs have proven themselves) I'll be sticking with hard drives.
You need your entire steam library at the airport? Extreme levels of virginity... Have you even seen boobs in person?
I believe you can even install them on a second hard drive like an external. It gives you that option during install now.
Put your current games on the SSD (Borderlands 2 loads like a champ off mine) and place the games that you might want to play on the other drive.
Have you considered that your use case and the use case they're aiming their hybrid drives at are completely different?
I'd be surprised if any current gen game would even run on a normal office PC, mine will just about manage WoW, and that's probably more 'high end' than an average office PC with 16GB RAM and a discrete (pretty low end) gfx card.
(I may be wrong, you may be working somewhere where they pay you to play games all day on a normal office PC, but I doubt it).
My SSD gave errors on boot (don't recall what kind of error, actually) sometimes. It went away after a month or so. No idea what caused it, no idea why it went away (although a guess would be a bad cell that the controller eventually decided to throw away completely, there will pretty much always be some bad cells in any flash). SSDs are pretty new technology, so backing up the data on it is extra-recommended (and a good idea anyways). The performance gains, though, are worth the risk of a failed drive, so long as you're careful. At least, in my opinion.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Apple cares a lot about geeks, particularly geeks with fat wallets and a lust for shiny hardware.
*seductive whisper* retina display...
Exactly. Best laptop (possibly computer) I've ever bought.
Oh hell yeah... it came up this weekend while I was visiting family..."Sure I spoiled myself, but let's remember that it's about 1/30th the price of a sports-car and a lot more safe."
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
I've used an SSD. Works great for my laptop and router, don't care for it for my desktop largely due to price. For $60, I can get an 80GB SSD or I can get a 2TB HDD. That 80GB SSD is going to require an additional HDD anyway for storage for many people.
Most consumers are still going to go with cheapest and, outside of the tech-oriented crowd, don't really care if they have to wait an extra few seconds. As far as I'm concerned, the SSD boat is still boarding passengers and is no where close to leaving just yet. Once SSD prices are more competitive with hard drives (which could be another decade or two at the least), then you can say that ship has sailed. Until then, cost will trump performance for the largest markets.
I use SSD for my boot drive - Do the OS install, install some app suites (some of which rudely insist upon being installed on the "C:" drive) then ghost it to another SSD for the eventual day the SSD has crapped out sufficiently. All main storage is on a RAID 5, about 6TB in size with the spare drive on the shelf for when one of those 3TB HDD finally kick the bitbucket.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
SSD's are no different get two with the longest warranty. The primary failure mode is running out of write cyles in which case it's still all readable. I've got nearly 1k ssd drive in production a mix of enterprise and cheap consumer ones expect a 3-5 year life span same as a HDD doing the same job.
Even in my own home all the PC save the headless server are solid ssd 60-250GB in size. The server uses HDD's in raid and backups go to a USB3 to Sata adapter via bacula and are moved offsite and migrated into a RAID (zfs with dedupe, separate write and read SSD's) before being returned home. I've been tempted to put in a point to point 10gb ethernet or infinband between the server and gaming PC and put some SSD"s for at least read acceleration into the server.
No sir I dont like it.
So because it doesn't offer a benefit to you, it can't be of benefit to 99% of computer users who don't go through nearly as much data as you do daily?
weinersmith
Most of the Seagate hybrids have SLC Flash. The spinning rust will puke long before the Flash does, unless you get very unlucky (or very lucky, depending on your point of view).
Thats what Network Storage is for. SSDs are meant to be treated like a hot rod. Hot and fast, but burns out faster. Still worth it.
Hard to beat those SSD boot times. :)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
> I currently have a 2 TB WD Black system drive - what do I replace it with?
You don't. You _augment_ it with an SSD.
OS + Critical (most often used) apps on the SSD. Everything else on the spindles.
The elephant in the room is that SSDs are unreliable so of course everything is backup on a NAS (Network Attached Storage) which you should be doing anyways, right?! I suggest FreeNAS http://www.freenas.org/ which is based on BSD and supports ZFS. Even has a GUI if you don't want to mess around with the command line. Or if you use Linux you can use ZFSonLinux http://zfsonlinux.org/
If you just want to a buy an off the shelf solution that just works Drobo is OK.
http://www.amazon.com/Drobo-Storage-Gigabit-Ethernet-DRDS4A21/
For SSD can personally recommend
* Samsung 840 PRO Series http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147193
* Intel 320 or 520 Series http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&Description=intel+ssd
Cheapest SSD prices are < $0.75 / GB. Just wait for them to go on sale (Black Friday, etc.)
Sorry, bad Drobo link. Use this one instead:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=drobo%20nas
Drives have had caches this size for ages and they still get spanked and users notice the difference. Useage statistics don't sell drives, user experience and benchmarks do, further, averages do not tell the whole story. Everyone has their individual peak use and and userbase will have their peak users. 8GB isn't even the average, what the heck are they thinking? If they pursue this they will undermine themselves as a company. I know it's the answer Seagate WANTS to hear but it's not the answer that will lead them to a winning business model.
Depends on the brand really. Both performance and quality vary widely. For some use cases, the performance of an SSD might not even beat a cheap spinny disk.
I imagine you need a fairly strange corner case where a "cheap spinny disk" is faster than a typical SSD.
Interestingly enough, the most reliable SSDs I know of are made by Samsung. I have a set of Samsung 830 SSDs (128GB and 256GB sizes) that have been going strong for about twelve months now... The Plextor M5S 128GB is also proving to be quite reliable in my desktop.
Which Samsung SSD are you running that's so unreliable? Sounds like you should just RMA it, tbh.
How do you access all of your data at the NSA? do they offer a subscription service or something?
Yes, they do!
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
2.5 GB isn't enough to notice a difference. Once you get a whole bunch of RAM (like 8-16 GB), it definitely helps speed up the machine up. Boot time doesn't increase, but Windows 7/8 is pretty good about keeping file cached. Once your machine has been up for a few hours, things work really fast. They say that 8 GB of NAND is all you need in a Hybrid drive. But 8 GB of RAM is really cheap, so why not just get 8 GB more of RAM and use a regular hard drive. It'll be faster to access the the data from memory than it will be to access it from NAND. The only advantage is that the hybrid drive will maintain the data past reboots and power outages. If they only need 8 GB, they should probably be using DDR3 (or better) instead of NAND flash, combined with some sort of battery backup to ensure the data can be retained after rebooting, or even after short power outages.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
They aren't claiming that 8GB flash makes the drive as good as SSDs. They are only claiming that it will be equivalent for most users.
dude. they TOTALLY ARE claiming it will make it as good as SSD.
"500GB, 7mm design for the latest thinnest laptops
1TB, 9.5mm design for maximum capacity laptops
Boots and performs like an SSD". that's their marketing material for it, for the 8gb nand models. now if you're claiming that they aren't claiming ssd like performance you're probably a lawyer working for seagate.
it isn't new even. they've been claiming this BS since they started selling them. I don't get why they don't just make a model with 64gbytes+ and up the price by 40 bucks or so. at least something like that I could consider.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Uh huh. So where do I store all my steam games, video files that I like to work on, etc.?
On my NAS you say? Sweet, now if I could only get good speeds across that VPN link to my house from the airport or my hotel, or killing time in an unused training room on my break.
GP was talking about laptops. Don't game on laptops. If I ever run into your slow-loading ass in a multiplayer game I will shit on your dick.
Holy crap you're right. I hadn't actually tried checking my Windows folder on this machine (128GB SSD, nearing the limit). Just the Windows folder alone is 30.4GB right now. That's insane..
which is totally what she said
I don't on software ones, but DO on "True SSD's" & have been for years -> http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4068409&cid=44509869
* You missed my correction (due to typo) in that link above.
APK
P.S.=> Remove the pagefile? Imo, risky, AND Yes - You'd still see paging (albeit NOT from the pagefile.sys, but rather executables (they page back to themselves))... apk
I saw these two excerpts:
> "Research found that normal **office computers**, not running data-centric applications, access just 9.58GB of unique data per day
and this:
> cease production of 7200 RPM **laptop drives** at the end of 2013, and just make models running at 5400 RPM
So let's take research on one market segment (office computers) and apply it to a completely different market segment (consumer laptops). I'm sure that'll work out just fine.
"Normal" office computers don't need hard drives at all. They don't need powerful CPUs or GPUs either. If the users could be weaned off of MS Office, a Raspberry Pi and network storage would probably meet the needs of the "normal office computers, not running data-centric applications" in Seagate's research.
Why not support SD card(s) on the hard drive and let the end user decide how much they need for specific applications?
Greed is the root of all evil.
> SSDs really are the bee's knees.
Depends on the brand really. Both performance and quality vary widely. For some use cases, the performance of an SSD might not even beat a cheap spinny disk.
So fixating on a narrow definition of typically is really extraordinarily stupid.
Seagate is just trying to be cheap and spinning this into the usual "geeks are irrelevant" kind of nonsense you usually see from Apple fanboys.
Also, the whole hybrid drive thing is a manifestation of just how terribly overpriced SSD drives are right now and how laptops typically are unable to accomodate 2 hard drives (one for speed and one for space).
Let me get this straight, the report is on "normal office computers", SSDs still have a high premium, and hybrids are a good fit for laptops. We also know office computers are cheap, laptops are laptops, and that's almost the whole PC market, those two.
It takes a real /. vet to come to the conclusion that Seagate is WRONG because powerful desktops are relevant, and Apple fanboys!
You know what I think your problem is? You need to build yourself a more powerful PC with the biggest most expensive SSD ever, and come back here to tell us all how long it is.
The key here is *most* people, not *every* person.
The point is that *everybody* does something that will tax the drive, and which isn't part of the 80% normal usage. What, exactly, it is is irrelevant. And if that is significantly slower, it will be a source of irritation.
That would be a good way to check the theory in real life. Apple combines 128 GB SSD + 1 or 3 TB hard drive, but you can build it yourself with any size SSD drive. Over at MacRumors obviously everyone is up in arms that 128 GB is much too small, while Seagate says 8 GB is enough.
Building a Fusion drive with 32 GB SSD (I suppose that's the smallest you can buy) and checking it in real life would be a good way to test this.
The Guangdong hellhole-dwellers will be happy the drives will be easier to produce.
They don't do any in the consumer space, I know of, but they make heavy hitting enterprise SSDs. They don't normally sell them to channels, they sell them to VARs like Dell who use them in their stuff.
I am using a SSD for a while as boot/system drive, no issues so far. But as a precaution my data (movies, music, source code, etc.) are on a HDD, If I lost the SSD I will only need to get another one (or a HDD) and reinstall the system, the personal data safe on the HDD (and periodic backups on blu-ray disks).
In short: SSD is still expensive, but you do not need a big one (just 60GB is already ok for a system drive).
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
However - Doesn't work for ALL I do here http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4068409&cid=44509763 (specifically only the pagefile.sys is uncompressed)
That's since it cannot be compressed while it operates - "rawwrite" written's why (& is in a way, it's "own partition" in that 1st of 2 partitions I made on my IRAM, because of it, in a diff. 'filesystem' used).
The rest of what I do in that list however, DOES get the benefits of compression while operating from RAM though...
(Albeit, again - Done from/on a dedicated piece of PCI-Express hardware using DDR-2 RAM in the 4gb Gigabyte IRAM I use, & before it the CENATEK RocketDrive 4gb PC-133 SDRAM, to do what's on the rest of my list to offload & speedup HDD's by removing those tasks to a faster media & reducing fragmentation of the filesystems on my HDD's too (in the same 'stroke' - bonus!)).
I get even faster seek/access, faster writes, and smaller filemass on disk (even works on SSD)/less to pickup due to compression (faster pickup still, but more beneficial on HDD's on this note admittedly, & today's fast CPU's offset the decompression stage via filesystem drivers in RAM).
You noted GOOGLE: By my placement of webbrowser caches (and browsers too) onto my "True DDR-2 SSD", I get MORE than DOUBLE what can be put into system RAM due to filesystem compression (& disable memory based browser caches as well, what's the point if it's read from memory on my IRAM SSD? Let the RAM be used elsewhere, like diskcache kernelmode subsystems instead of memory caches in the browser)).
APK
P.S.=> Been doing what's on that list of mine from my 1st post since, oh, NTFS on Windows 3.51 / circa 1994 onwards, iirc (1st on software ramdisks, & then later the RamDrive addon boards I noted in my initial post)... apk
I was thinking more like RAID 5 or other models with redundancy, just in the same housing. HEY! don't be stealing my idea
So you want to write to at least three different disks [or parts of one disk] within the same physical housing, and deal with the write speed penalty of RAID 5. Don't worry; no one wants to steal your bad idea.
lol.
Yeah, that figures.
Mine boots Kubuntu in 4-ish seconds from grub menu to KDE desktop ready to go. It's quite impressive.
Man, Dropbox better watch out. Serious competition here.
But really, had the NSA pitched their product as a 'service', people would have fallen all over themselves to pay for it.
"Stores everything, everywhere! Never back up again!"
What's not to like?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Looks to me like Seagate is going to give up that market to WD and others.
Oh, they already have. I used to swear by Seagate drives... but that was several years ago.
You're the first post I have ever heard about Samsung drives having issues since they fixed some problems a few years back.
An HDD *can* be recovered, but only if you're lucky will you actually get any of your data out. Having an HDD over an SSD is no reason to feel that your data is 'safe'.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
Yes, SSDs are faster and more expensive. The obvious approach is to have an SSD that's big enough for the stuff you use all the time, and a spinny drive to handle the bulk storage. Hybrid drives (which were the original topic here) have a spinny drive with a small flash cache, so you can do most of your I/O from flash and it can keep the mechanical drive updated at its leisure, so your CPU isn't stuck waiting for rotation latency.
But you could do just as well by having an operating system doing the caching in separate storage; hybrid drives are mainly a win for people with lame OS's. (Oh, wait, most OS's are a bit lame about this.) MS's Readyboost stuff was supposed to be a big win; I've only tried it using an SDHC flash card, which might be on a slow bus, instead of an SSD that probably has a faster connection, but I haven't seen a significant speedup when I use it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
For $60, I can get an 80GB SSD or I can get a 2TB HDD. That 80GB SSD is going to require an additional HDD anyway for storage for many people.
...that's if you ignore the performance benefits of using a SSD as your system drive. I stuck a SSD in my 2-year old system and it felt like a new machine - its not just about loading/copying large files - the vastly reduced seek times put the skates under virtually anything that uses the disk. That's worth money.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Yeah, I was thinking that too. Maybe if you use SATA to IDE converters and only read contiguous blocks 99% of the time. Otherwise I haven't seen a single 'cheap' spinny disk which can match an SSD in anything except capacity.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
Given that people buy machines with 8 and 16 gigs of RAM nowadays (if not more), isn't it more cost effective to just let the OS use that extra memory for caching instead of pushing the memory down to the drive? After all, the OS is making block level IO requests and has far more knowledge about what data it's going to use than the drive ever could.
And if they're not making 7200 rpm drives any more, then I'm not buying Seagate drives any more. I do not want laptop quality drives in my box -- I run databases and compilers and other such IO intensive loads far too often.
By the way, when I *rebuild* my projects, it takes about half the time of the initial build because all the source has been loaded into cache by Linux, so all it needs to do is *write* the outputs.
Perhaps I've answered my question about RAM cache vs. disk cache if and only if it's faster to write to SSD cache than it is to write to physical disk.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
30 years ago, disk failures were a serious problem. 20 years ago they were still a problem. By 10 years ago, Moore's Law was cranking disk price/performance so fast that your disk had a 99.99% chance of being boringly small and obsolete long before it failed, and it's still the same. Yes, that 8GB SSD cache for your 1TB drive may fail in 5 years, but 5 years from now you'll have junked that wimpy drive and replaced it with a cheaper 128GB cache and 8TB drive.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
A hybrid drive builds the caching function into the drive, as opposed to having the OS keep track of disk-vs-flash-vs-RAM and doing its own caching. So yeah, it's possible that if the hybrid drive is badly designed, a failure in the flash could result in losing access to the data on the spinning drive as well; you'd hope they'd avoid that.
And yeah, of course you need backups. A bullet-proof hybrid drive design or OS caching algorithm isn't going to stop you from scribbling the wrong stuff onto the drive.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I'm a developer + geek, and I have a 60GB SSD running as my main OS harddrive, and space is only rarely an issue. You're not supposed to be installing anything but the most critical applications onto your SSD. The rest you just junction off onto the spinning harddrive that you need to have for non speed-critical data.
By the way, the reason I used an SDHC instead of a USB stick was mainly because the SD slot fits inside the laptop body, while a USB drive would have stuck out and I'd have had to remove it every time I put the laptop into its bag, plus I often needed both USB slots. For a desktop box the USB would win, or an internal SSD hanging off a SATA port, which most motherboards seem to have spares of.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This is great for writes but I don't see how it helps for reads? You're just hoping the 8GB you need is in the cache. Smells like bullshit to me.
I have a set of Samsung 830 SSDs (128GB and 256GB sizes) that have been going strong for about twelve months now
Only 12 months? I've got a first generation SSD that's going on 4 years now of continuous uptime. I've yet to have a single problem with it, let alone cell issues that some people have had.
Om, nomnomnom...
When these hybrids can reach the speeds of my SSDs, at > 400 MB/s r/w for larger than 8 GB of unique data, I'll be happy to consider replacing my SSDs with them.
Nothing like being able to duplicate a few TB in a few minutes.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Fumble fingers - meant to type NAS.
Sure you did.
Absolutely! Would I lie to you, Mr. Joshua J. Fortenbras of 1104 W. Finster Ave, Quimby, NJ, who works at Asset Assure Investments (formerly Dewey, Cheatham & Howe). I trust you enjoyed your bacon and gerbil omlet, for breakfast this morning.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
That's the problem with Seagate's caching algorithm.
You, the user, have no control over what's cached and what isn't.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Mine boots Kubuntu in 4-ish seconds from grub menu to KDE desktop ready to go. It's quite impressive.
I shudder to think of the day when I become complacent and feel the 3-4 second boot times are 'slow'.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
If a dumbo like you can think of it in 3 seconds, then I'm sure that those engineers might have stumbled on that idea as well and made sure this failure scenario is avoided.
For $60, I can get an 80GB SSD or I can get a 2TB HDD. That 80GB SSD is going to require an additional HDD anyway for storage for many people.
...that's if you ignore the performance benefits of using a SSD as your system drive. I stuck a SSD in my 2-year old system and it felt like a new machine - its not just about loading/copying large files - the vastly reduced seek times put the skates under virtually anything that uses the disk. That's worth money.
Well, if you're like me, then 90+% of the bits on your drives are not accessed on a daily basis. There's long term storage (data rarely changes, read occasionally), and then there's interactive storage (unpredictable read/write patterns, heavy use). Caching of the sort proposed by TFA would certainly increase performance for HDD use as interactive storage, but not to the level of SSD. Conversely, the performance enhancements offered by SSD are almost entirely wasted when used for long term storage.
So, in a desktop scenario, what makes the most sense is to have small, fast SSDs for your OS, Virtual Memory, Temp storage, and any frequently used applications, and then large, cheap, HDDs for straight storage.
The 8GB is likely to be SLC though. That means it handles the same number of write cycles as approximately 80GB of 2-bit MLC or perhaps 400GB of 3-bit.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
We regularly send 85MB spread sheets in the mail multiple times a day. And a Powerpoint isn't a Powerpoint until it's a hundred pages or more. Anything less is a thumbnail of an outline and will be immediately discarded. In order to justify 3 hr conference calls with 70 people on them you HAVE to have multi multihundred megabyte Powerpoints not including the aformentioned embedded spreadsheets. Anyone who's mail file is less than 2GB isn't doing their job and will be fired.
http://www.hardware-revolution.com/best-ssd-best-hdd-for-your-money-may-2013/ has been my favorite resource when it's time to buy. I never really cared about warranties and just a bit about reliability. I just always expect a drive to fail eventually and make sure my RAID & backups are configured to help me recover from it.
If you're happy with HDDs, though, by all means stick with it. I prefer spending my money on RAM instead of SSDs, since once you get your stuff cached in RAM, it's not going to hit the SSD anymore anyway. And even if you don't suspend to RAM, HDDs can still perform pretty well nowadays on reboots since most modern OSs do a pretty good job of optimizing disk accesses to make maximum use of readahead and get the initial "lots of small files" reads at closer to block-read speeds (~100MB/s) instead of random-read speeds (~10MB/s + seek latency).
It all depends on the application what kind of disks that are useful for your solution.
The lower RPM drives aren't as good as the higher RPM drives to swallow a continuous stream of data for a long time when it comes to many terabytes of data, and in those solutions a hybrid is more or less a waste of technology. Especially if you have a solution where you already need to stripe over a large number of disks in order to achieve a sufficient storage speed.
In other solutions where it's to be used for office or general use then you can use separate SSD and add mechanical disks if you need to store larger chunks of data.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Samsung 830. I've bought several, even a couple well after the release of the 840. The 840 is just not nearly as reliable, and the 830 is plenty fast.
I would say that because it happened to me last month. It was complete bullshit and I had to do some haxxoring around in the registry to get Windows to undo the stupidity.
No, but try loading a media rich page today, it can easily take 5 minutes with a broad band connection, and rather more with a dial up connection. Thanks to buffer bloat, you end up getting latency for each of the 6 dozen scripts that they insist upon loading from random servers.
Which is fine as long as you don't mind the data corruption that comes from that. And you're not actually needing to use those files with any regularity.
What's more, that still requires good old fashioned HDDs, so I'm not sure how your suggestion makes SSDs and more desirable as the network is still going to be slower than any HDD that's presently on the market.
Time to move on from XP. You should really give Windows 7 a try.
Yeah, you let me know when I can buy a 3TB SSD for $100.
Wait a sec . . . How do you access all of your data at the NSA? do they offer a subscription service or something?
FOIA request. The latency is lousy, but you can't beat the reliability of the backup servers.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I have one of these new Seagate hybrid laptop drives (1TB) and for many operations, it is significantly SLOWER than the 5400 RPM drive that it replaces. Sleep and wake are now very erratic compared to the old drive. Sometimes is takes a few seconds and sometimes, the Seagate hybrid drive goes off and stares at it's navel for 30-60 seconds. At work, I use all SSD and this hybrid drive is not anywhere near the same league for day-to-day operations. I'm debating now whether to go to a straight 7200RPM drive or SSD. This hybrid is a nice marketing stunt, but not much more.
Hell I don't care how fast your SSD's are. My sales people walk into an office where their computers are already awake (wake timers). All they have to do is log-in and get to work.
From a business standpoint - an SSD on a sales drone system is over priced for little to no benefit since everything except the OS should be on the damn server anyhow. This way if the idiot gets hit by a bus during lunch, someone else can pickup their work and run with it. In fact, this is true of everyone in the fucking company.
My freshly installed mint desktop is using 5gb total, with almost no personal files on it, and only a couple smallish apps added from what came with the distro. That seems like a lot. I remember when my slackware 0.9 lived in a 50mb partition 20 years ago. Things are easier now, but I don't think I'm doing that much more with it, web browsing, terminals, and a couple other apps. 8gb would be fine for me. 8gb hybrid ssd/ram would be better, but I'm not sure manually the ramdrive would give that much of an advantage over the ssd for the futzing, risk, and boot time penalty involved. An hdd would be nice to hold media, which can peel off slower.
It all depends on your priorities & values.
I find the 120-250GB SSDs a really good value right now. For $100-$200, I get plenty of fast storage to install my OS and all applications on. It definitely makes the system feel zippier; I have an SSD as the system drive in all 4 systems I have. I keep most of my data (documents, photos, videos, download archives) on my HDD, not necessarily because it's more reliable but because that data is typically not frequently accessed, any millisecond delay won't be noticed anyway, and I don't want to have to worry about managing the size of my personal data store vs free space on the SSD.
On the issue of reliability, all drives fail. Maybe statistically SSDs will fail sooner than HDDs (although I'm not even sure if that's true), but that means very little on an individual drive basis. If all of your data is on a single drive, you are definitely at risk. Anecdotally, I've had more HDDs fail on me in the last 15 years (3-4) than SSDs (0). (although I did have some SSDs with undesirable behavior that needed a firmware upgrade).
Or get a 120GB SSD (around $100 right now), which is big enough to install Windows + pretty much all your apps (Visual Studio, Office, Photoshop, etc), and still have plenty enough left-over space that your SSD can move blocks around for years to come.
And then you can avoid worrying about junctions :-)
NOT via software ones (ramdrives that are device drivers emulating a disk, e.g. ramdrive.sys), but DO on "True SSD's" (based on DDR-2 RAM, not Flash) & have been for years in hardware since oh, 1999 iirc!
I did a "correction" to my post -> http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4068409&cid=44509869 See that...
I used ramdrives (software) vs. ramdisks (hardware) before the taking up of ramdisks in hardware though for EVERYTHING BUT the pagefile!
I didn't put pagefile.sys into RAM that way, why? Well - I didn't have systems with ENOUGH ram on them is why (an excess for my uses in other words)
That's ALL that "held me back" though really, & that only (because it IS doable with the right ramdisk software, like EEC Systems/SuperSpeed.com's SuperDisk II - IF you have enough RAM, mainly to avoid HDD bound latency).
* You missed my correction post (due to typo) in that link above.
APK
P.S.=> Thus, my pagefile.sys IS IN RAM, albeit, dedicated RAM (no "flush" via FIFO algorithm aging or premature flush due to memory pressure from OTHER apps & their data either - it works: Less latency & effectively "caching" the pagefile into RAM, albeit dedicated RAM)... apk
That would be competition. Dropbox may allow you to upload what you want to their cloud, but the NSA already has everything you would upload on their servers already. No need to upload anything!
And yes, they even have your alpaca porn, you sick fuck.
What data corruption are you referring to? I use SSDs for boot and I keep all my working data sets on the NAS and pull them as needed at 50MB/sec. Its a good plateau to be at.
Good-bye
An SSD in your desktop is for the OS. A sane person has a spinning rust device for actual storage
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I have very very very expensive electricity costs. Do I save any electricity using a hybrid drive over a regular drive or just use SSD? The size of the drive is not important.
I've used an SSD. Works great for my laptop and router, don't care for it for my desktop largely due to price.
You're nuts, just try prying my desktop SSD from my cold dead hands...
An SSD in your desktop is for the OS. A sane person has a spinning rust device for actual storage
Just out of curiosity, if you carry a laptop around without paying attention to the risk of head crashes, how likely are modern HDDs to have a head crash, rather than parking the heads in time or otherwise managing to avoid the head crash? (My current model of laptop didn't offer an HDD, and I wasn't interested in other models, so that wasn't an option for me.)
My own benchmarks on hybrid hard disks don't reflect Seagate's claims at all.
Seagates drives no longer interest me, if they stop making 7200+ rpm model. I will no longer buy them.
Will they even be around in a few years, if they continue with this strategy? To me it seems very high risk.
Seagate have just permanently lost another customer, at least until they start making high capacity SSDs. Spinning media is obsolete, except maybe for online backup, or to sit behind heavily SSD cached SAN arrays.
Even large Whamcloud/Lustre SANs are now extensively using SSDs. Where is the demand for Seagate's legacy 5400rpm products.
I recommend water based paint, it dries much quicker.
Yup, they missed the boat. Anyone who has used a SSD will go back to using a regular HD when they stop making SSDs, and the last available one breaks.
SSDs really are the bee's knees.
I though I would be one of those people.
But my latest work laptop has 16GB of RAM, which is basically enough to cache pretty much anything I touch during the day. So once the cache is hot, I don't notice any slowdows from the HDD.
As a result, the laptop is perfectly usable with a HDD once booted (I only ever suspend to RAM). And even then, Ubuntu 12.04 boots pretty quickly from cold, though things like Lotus Notes and Eclipse can be slow to start up.
By contrast, my old WinXP based laptop was totally transformed by an SSD, to the point that I genuinely didn't even notice it thrashing to swap when it ran out of RAM.
SSD good. RAM better!
I will never buy a hybrid drive from seagate or anyone else. It's a huge waste of effort and money which only adds additional more uncertainty to the failure cases that already exist. 8GB of flash on a hybrid drive at best improves boot times by a second or two (literally, just that), and there's no point 'caching' application binaries when you can trivially stuff 16G+ of ram in a modern machine.
My windows box boots from a normal HDD just fine. If anyone is unhappy with their boot times it's probably because their machines are loaded with tons of crapware.
Laptops don't need HDDs at all. Just go with a SSD. There is absolutely no need to store your life's work on your laptop when a myrid of wireless/internet/automatic backup solutions are available.
Workstations and servers will want discrete SSDs in addition to HDDs. We stuff 128-256GB SSDs on our servers, use ~30G for boot+root, and the remaining 200GB to help cache the filesystems on the HDDs. Works great. The last thing you want are idiotic multi-failure-mode hybrid drives on an important machine.
I am not particularly married to WD or Seagate, but the last few years Seagate's line-up has been such a horrid mish-mash of half-baked features that I've pretty much been sticking to WD.
-Matt
don't care for it for my desktop largely due to price. For $60, I can get an 80GB SSD
Wat. There hasn't been a better way to spend $60 to upgrade the performance of your desktop since .. Well, ever. The only thing that comes close is adding a stick of RAM to a machine that is RAM-starved in the first place and has to swap to the HDD all the time.
I can understand choosing a normal HDD in a laptop as space is limited. But in a desktop?
How cheap do you want (80GB) SSDs to become before you plug one in? $30? $10?
My (technologically challenged) friends that have listened to my advice about putting an SSD in their new system worship the ground I walk on because of that advice (I might be exaggerating slightly here ;-). They all experience the same thing when going back to a machine without an SSD:
Huh..?
What's happening..?
I clicked on it, right?
Why is it..?
*hears HDD rattle*
Ah.
Everyone else is a fool with no appreciation of sound quality and/or no appreciation of ownership. The latter will learn the hard way when their collection disappears some day. The former might as well have a small child follow them around with a toy xylophone; it'll sound just as good, and won't continually raise its subscription fees.
I don't know - I tend to run my HDs into the ground, and in every case when the grinding starts I've managed to recover at least 20-50% of my data with minimal corruption, which is usually enough to save just about everything I actually care about.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Ok, SSDs give much better performance. I never disputed that. However, the performance still isn't worth to price to a lot of people. It's the same reason some people will buy a car with a 1.6L engine and others will buy the same car with the 2.0L engine. It's not that the 1.6L people don't value the extra power of the 2.0L, it's that they don't want to pay more for it.
You missed it (predates your & others' sarcasm) -> http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4068409&cid=44509869
I.E.-> I don't DO pagefile.sys onto SOFTWARE RAMDRIVES, but do Do them on HARDWARE-BASED (DDR-2 RAM, not Flash) PCI-Express based Gigabyte IRAM units!
(HOWEVER - IF I had enough RAM? I would... I just never have!)
APK
P.S.=> My Gigabyte IRAM "True SSD" based on DDR-2 RAM has 4gb total, with a 1gb pagefile partition & rest of what I listed on the other 3gb to offload that work from slower mechanical HDD's & to also lessen fragmentation, a performance killer, on them also (2 for the price of 1, along with faster seek/access - less latency)...
... apk
Agreed.
Part of me wonders if the "real" reason for this move isn't at least in part due to Flash's lower reliability - what happens to your $100 3TB drive when the $10 cache gives up the ghost? Given the track record of SSD's I'm not confident that a hybrid drive will fail gracefully. So then what? Hope that you have all 3TB backed up and buy a new drive?. I'm especially concerned since almost every HDD I've owned (right back to the 20MB monster on my 286) has lasted 10+ years and given me plenty of warning as it began to fail, but everything I'm hearing suggests SSDs get nowhere close to that.
I do like the idea though - it sounds like it works great for reducing loading times for games like Skyrim where there's lots of asset reuse. So if I have a bunch of games then the one or two I'm playing this week transparently get a performance boost without me worrying about it. I'd just prefer it be a modular system such as what Intel and others have played with, except with reliably graceful failure modes: have an 8GB SSD *intelligently* caching my 4TB HDD, and when the SSD starts failing there should be 0% data loss, just a performance degradation until you install a new 32GB SSD for $20.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
upgraded my boss' work computer to an SSD 2 days ago.
He is already planning to get his home desktop; his home laptop upgraded asap.
Most people that don't upgrade to SSD's haven't used them.
Techies have used them; that is why we upgrade. Everyone else isn't being a cheap to save cash; they are being cheap because they don't realise how good it is.
keep the black, install your OS on a 128 or 256 gb Samsung 840 Pro
Samsung 840 pro's have a 5 year warranty.
(dont get an 840, or an 840 EVO, they are theoretically less reliable, and only have a 3 year warranty).
It is worth every moment of hassle to upgrade to SSD - it really is amazing how much faster everything is.
So all data on a gigantic drive is written to one tiny little flash zone first the majority of the time and that flash memory can only take about 2000 write operations. Great idea. It's guaranteed to fry in 6 months of normal use.
Intel drives have been rock-solid for me.
And just put everything else on a big NAS device.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
True enough, but I think we are safe enough ignoring use cases that only exist in the bizzaro world.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I have a Seagate Hybrid drive (7200 rpm) in my Macbook. . It made a huge difference over the old 5400 standard HDD. Really great. And cheap. I seriously doubt its "as good" as an SSD though.
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
...that's if you ignore the performance benefits of using a SSD as your system drive
That's the amazing thing about a hybrid drive though, which is what Seagate is pushing. At $60 for 80GB of SSD, that's $66 for 8GB of flash cache on a 2TB HD. Best of all: NO ACTIVE MANAGEMENT.
I tried active management between my 64GB SSD(yes, on a budget) and a 1TB HD. What with my movement between games(love steam!), I found I was spending more time managing which games were on the SSD than I was saving from the faster performance.
Consider a 'manual' solution: All the OS drivers, manual files and other things you 'never' access are on the expensive storage space SSD. Unless you spend 'huge money', some of your actively used files will end up on the cheaper HD. Or, like me, you end up spending way too much time moving data around.
The automatic solution? All the OS files that aren't frequently used - drivers for hardware your system doesn't have, help files, documentation, various other bits of cruft(more prevalent on some OS's than others), are eventually shuffled onto the HD, while the boot files remain in places of honor on the SSD. That game you no longer play? Eventually shuffled onto the HD.
Heck, I've read that one of the solutions doesn't work on a file basis, but on a block basis - so if only PART of a file's blocks are frequently accessed(perhaps a blob file?)...
Though as a power user/gamer I think I'd prefer a 16/32GB cache option. It would let the program be much less aggressive about moving stuff off the SSD.
I don't read AC A human right
Virtually every test performed on hybrid drive so far shows that for all practical purposes it performs about the same as a regular hard drive. Research, my arse ...
their tests conclude that 8GB is enough, when it clearly isn't. they are doing this because their Hybrid drives are sold with limited amounts of SSD cache, and to get the consumers interest, they develop material like this to get the fan boys and consumers talking about it. they hope that people even discuss the issue and get people throwing around the terms and information they provide.
HDD will never be as good as a SSD, either. I have one of those Hybrid drives, and it performs almost the same as a HDD. it is faster just ever so slightly on the boot. my SSD is really quick, booting in seconds, vs 20-30 seconds for the HDD. transfer rate is also ALWAYS slow on the HDD, even when using data stored on the SSD cache (the benefit from Seagates implementation is latency, rather than throughput).
Interestingly enough, the most reliable SSDs I know of are made by Samsung. I have a set of Samsung 830 SSDs (128GB and 256GB sizes) that have been going strong for about twelve months now... The Plextor M5S 128GB is also proving to be quite reliable in my desktop.
Which Samsung SSD are you running that's so unreliable? Sounds like you should just RMA it, tbh.
My Samsung SSD 840 500GB has been extremely solid.
For some use cases, the performance of an SSD might not even beat a cheap spinny disk.
So fixating on a narrow definition of typically is really extraordinarily stupid.
Ooof, you make my head hurt. Wish I had some mod points to downvote this. In MOST use cases, SSDs will be a tremendous speed upgrade. As most people here are saying, the idea is to have both an SSD for OS/application installs, and a traditional HDD for media storage. That is far from a "narrow definition of [typical]". It is ideal for most people, if they can afford it.
TomsHardware performed a thorough review of a Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid Hard Drives. I recommend reading it.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/momentus-xt-750gb-review,3223.html
Their conclusion:
"Really, the only time Seagate's Momentus XT slowed down drastically compared to an SSD was when we installed the operating system and applications. Once everything was fully loaded, however, performance rapidly improved as the drive's software algorithms pulled the most frequently-access data into flash, bestowing very SSD-like qualities to it. At that point, it was frankly hard to tell the difference during most common tasks. "
The radar plot at the end shows the mix of compromises, and the performance suggests it's worth a look if you're otherwise buying large capacity.
Beware: I believe all are created equal, and have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
IMO go with crucial. Using a 256GB crucial M4 in my gaming laptop, have had a raid0 128gb crucial M4 setup in my gaming desktop for a couple of years now. Zero issues.
I had issues with a patriot torqx 64gb dropping sometimes before firmware updated several iterations. I have a corsair force 3 120GB that hasn't had too many problems. I have an adata SSD in an ultrabook without any issues. Most of them are pretty good. The samsung stuff is using TLC chips which wasn't super popular afaik before they came to the market with it. In the long run it may get more reliable and cheaper but for now there isn't any advantage to going with the TLC stuff.
My next SSD will be a crucial drive assuming they keep up with speed and reliability. Intel has always sacrificed the most speed and capacity, OCZ has always been the least reliable (granted, mostly due to controller woes that aren't all their fault, ultimately I blame them)
You're joking, right? 50MB/s is more than what a typical HDD can sustain when hooked up locally. What's more, SMB has crap for error correction. The last time I trusted it for that, it wound up corrupting random bits of my files leading me to just start over.
Beyond that, 50MB/s requires at least a 400mbps connection, which is more than I have. Seems simpler, to just hook up the drive locally and pay for a proper drive, rather than waste huge amounts of money on a puny SSD that won't even save you that much time in the long term.
That would require me to give MS more money and I'm tired of wasting my time beta testing their software. I've got 7 on my laptop, but I will not be buying any more copies of Windows in the future.
The fact that they would even do something this stupid without asking, is a source of great consternation.
"It will cease production of 7200 RPM laptop drives at the end of 2013, and just make models running at 5400 RPM."
Then it's time to move to a manufacturer that won't drop 7200 RPM drives. While it may run a bit hot, the 7200RPM 750GB Momentus XT isn't otherwise a bad drive.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Let me direct you to two facts:
1) Anecdotal evidence isn't very valid.
2) That was written in 2011.
So my anecdotal evidence based on newer drives (2012 and 2013 drives)? Zero failures over 5 drives. So I guess that mean by his crazy/hot scale that SSDs are perfectly stable, not at all crazy!
Look, drives fail. All of them, in the long run. It is a question of how often, and how long. I've had plenty of HDDs fail on me in my career in computer support. I don't have stats on SSD vs HDD failure rates, and it would seem neither do you, and neither does that dude. However if you reason for disliking them is you've had a whole one drive and it has failed, well that's a bad reason.
This, we've got about 200 of the stupid things between the various Samsungs - dell models, 830's and 840s now from work to home machines. Only had one totally kick the bucket and we tossed it back and sent it in for scrap
I have one of their SSDs when I was buying multiple brands for testing in multiple machines from AMD to VIA to Intel. Before flashing it was awful and had issues, but is rock solid since!
You arent looking at the whole picture. My office gets hot, so i wanted all the big hot drives in another room. Im wired for Cat6 in every room, with a gigabit managed switch. Each machine(5 total) has a 128 GB SSD and everything else goes on the NAS. I can provide huge, fast, reliable storage to 5 machines with just 2 HDD. Just because it seems simpler to just slap them into a box and call it good doesnt make it so, or address any of my design concerns. Only one of my desktop systems can even fit a 3.5" drive.
Good-bye
Yeah, the early firmwares for the m4 series had some issues but it was nothing like the sandforce controller based drives at the time. Once they did that major firmware update that improved performance like 20% across the board it was more or less ironed out.
Now that i'm thinking of it though, I think there was an issue with the M4 drives where it would crash after 5000 hours of use... http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/Crucial-M4-128-GB-Random-Freezes/td-p/95787
That was fixed with a firmware update well over a year ago now.
I was going through some old bills the other day and found one for $300 for a 27GB "spinny disk", and that was a good deal at the time. $600 is a fricken STEAL for near a terabyte of super fast SSD on a single 2.5" drive. Good luck pushing even a single 3.5" HD in any laptop, never mind 3 in RAID.
I work on hobby projects on my laptop while riding public transit. 802.11n doesn't reach very far outside one's house, and mobile broadband costs about $10/GB.
Your anecdote is kinda pointless. But the real stats do agree with you. Samsung's return rate is 0.5% per year on SSDs. Meanwhile, the average for hard disks is about 5%.
Burns out faster is a myth.
Current SSDs will last about 20 years of writing 10GB a day (which is significantly more than most people ever do). Do they wear out? Yes. Is the time they wear out in short enough that you should be concerned? No. Most Hard Disks will have died long before an SSD does.
It's a bug, I'm sure. It thinks your drive is failing because of an unexpected condition that wasn't handled properly. That's a guess anyway.
I've actually had a first-generation hybrid drive (Momentus XT 500GB) where the SSD failed. It's not a critical failure, but it does cause a lot of oddities. I had issues with reads sometimes taking longer off the local disk than it did off a network share... in Durban. And yes, we have servers in Durban :) Anyway, yes the failure makes the operating system almost unusable (Windows) but I was easily able to recover to a new 2nd gen 750GB Momentus XT which has been rock solid reliable ever since.
Note that the SSD is a read cache only, though I believe some of the more recent ones actually have write caching as well... I'd be a bit dubious of them myself.
I'm not completely sold on Seagate's position here though. I think that they're right that an SSD cache in front of a spinning disk is a great compromise. Yes, my laptop is actually quite acceptable speed though nowhere close to my Intel NUC with a 128GB mSATA SSD in boot speed... but actually running I only occasionally have times where I'm sitting waiting for my system to catch up with me. As a general rule I'm highly productive... and for those games I play on my laptop with Steam the launch and disk access performance is good enough.
I do definitely notice a bit of a "performance ramp" in that when I first got the drive installed and got my applications installed there was a definite timeframe when things were a little slower and I noticed speed up... but these days since I have pretty set work routines I don't have any noticeable difference in performance from day to day. As a general rule, it's the very occasional app launch that seems to take forever that really stands out. Again, though I have to say that in general my laptop launches frequently used apps noticeably faster than my colleague's laptops. I'm currently the only person in the company testing hybrid disks.
Yes, a straight SSD is a lot faster, but you're right in that the failure modes of an SSD are pretty binary... one moment they work and the next moment it's "Operating system not found" on boot. Believe me... I've been down that road and as much as I love the speed of SSD I won't commit my critical data to it. Of course, I also live by the philosophy that data doesn't exist until there are at least two copies (one on my drive, the other on my backup). And all my actual data is stored on a GIT-based Dropbox-alike so I have a local cache and a copy backed up and versioned to my server!
But their failure modes are awful. I've had SSD's fail and they go from blinding performance to "Operating System Not Found" in precisely zero seconds. Well... zero seconds plus the time taken to realize there's a problem, hard-reboot the system and POST. Hard drives still tend to corrupt first and fail later. You usually have decent warning of a failure.
Though I agree; SSD's get a bad rap for failures when they really don't fail often. Heat will kill them rapidly though!
Why does the hard disk have to use ssd's 8 gigs is one dim3 bar or equivalent. And with a tiny rechargeable battery on the drive , it could store data for months in the cache.
Our old raid servers had sealed lead acid battery backups. Could save the data in cache for more than a year. Battery life was estimated at 7 years.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
It shouldn't care about files at all. The whole thing should appear as a block device with the ssd transparently caching the most frequently accessed blocks. The file system cares about files but that shouldn't be the job of the hardware.
My Win 7 Pro folder is about 30 GB, with over half in the Windows component store directory (winxsx). But according to this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2795190, the size is somewhat overstated. Also, the actual space being used can be reduced - I may give that a try.
If you don't have most of your stuff stored via a library or other link on an NSA or server . . .
Wait a sec . . . How do you access all of your data at the NSA? do they offer a subscription service or something?
I believe the NSA is offering a subpoena service, not a subscription service.
Modern hard drives (particularly drives made for mobile devices) have built-in accelerometers that should move the heads away from the platters if they are experiencing a free fall. Of course, this is not a guarantee of anything, but it should decrease the odds a bit. More info on that here.
Well, sounds like a failure isn't as bad as it could be - I heard several stories of the Intel bios-based solution causing total data loss on the HDD when the caching SSD failed. Still sounds like it will significantly shorten the useful drive life though. I suppose it could be delegated to infrequently used backups after the cache fails, but it sounds like it's performance falls well below that of an uncached drive.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
That can be a bit tougher to do with a laptop, thought with some like my Thinkpad, you can replace the optical drive with a second 2.5" drive bay.
That's what the manufacturers claim. Well, you should also see the claims they put on their hard drives versus reality.
Experience has shown that SSDs seem to have more problems. Oftentimes, it's not the flash media itself but the controller and the drive's firmware that causes all the problems.
>unless I have some type of constant, ongoing backup mechanism to more reliable (and slower) media
You should have that anyways.