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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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... all solid state in my laptop. I hate hybrids.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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.
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?
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.
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.
SSHDs as implemented by Seagate do not require any support whatsoever in the host. Their caching algorithm does not care anything about the FS. It is block level. I have one working just fine in arch linux. Linux just sees it as any other HD, only it is much faster overall. Obviously you will never see any improvement at all in huge file copies.
WD has some lame Windows-only SSHD tech that does require special software on the host.
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
Not much use if half of the 8 gig is used for storing system files that are accessed on a reboot / cold boot that wipes the RAM.
Also 8GB of NAND probably costs $4, which is a lot less than 8GB of RAM.
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.
My first computer had 4kb of ram. Get off my lawn ;)
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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
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.
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.
RAM cache is useless for speeding up writes. A significant (although workload-dependent) part of the performance problem with spinning disks is that if you issue a write and then need to block until it's on disk (which you need for consistency), it can easily take 5-10ms (or more) and that severely limits the performance. Often, non-server workloads include doing a lot of small synchronous writes and then no writes for a while. An SSD as a write-through cache works well here because it can reorder a lot of writes to turn (some of) them into sequential writes and it can trickle out a lot of writes while the disk is idle. This is also pretty much the best case for flash longevity: you don't need wear levelling, because you just treat the entire flash as a ring buffer and write to one end and write to the disk from the other end. You can keep the translation layer in RAM, and if there's a power failure you just replay the entire flash journal onto the disk.
The 'only reads 8GB' of unique data per day number is meaningless as an indication of how often each thing is used, however. If each day you always access the same 8GB, then an 8GB cache will be perfect for you. If you always access 8GB a day and you only access 7.5GB of it once, then a 512MB cache will be fine and you'll get no benefit from more, but you will get a big benefit from having a faster underlying storage device.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unique Data doesn't mean "data that has never been touched before", it means "data that has not been touched in this 24 hour period"
So if I open a 100MB file five times today, it counts as 100MB of unique data for today. If I open it again four times tomorrow, it still counts as 100MB of unique data for tomorrow. It is NOT cumulative.
Also consider that locally installed programs count too, including the OS. That very easily adds up to 10GB even if all of the actual "data" files are stored non-locally.
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
I purchased one of those drives on the day it was available at Newegg for use in Linux, and then shortly after for a pair of them in RAID0 for a desktop (gaming) system where data integrity wasn't my main concern. In both systems I ran into firmware problems and could not natively flash them in the system that was running them. I pulled them into a bench PC I have and flashed them there and everything was fine. The issue had to do with power saving and would cause some pretty frequent hardware locking issues on both systems that was painful until I was able to resolve them. All 3 of the drives are benched now, but still work fine. I never lost any data due to the lockups - they would just hard lock the PC for a second or three and then continue working like nothing had happened.
In my experience this is typical early adopter fare.
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?
"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?
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.
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.
Fumble fingers - meant to type NAS.
Sure you did.
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 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
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
Time to move on from XP. You should really give Windows 7 a try.
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."
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
...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
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!