News - Toshiba enters hybrid HDD market

[HEXUS]

Up to 1TB 2.5” hybrid drives will be aimed at consumers.

Read more.

[Lucio]

For the typical home user, this type of device should be a perfect balance between price, capacity and performance and allow your traditional HDD manufacturers to contnue selling their product for a good long while.

[Unique]

sounds like what i'm looking for, a couple of these in a 17" laptop, maybe even stripe raided

[crossy]

However since launch these hybrid drives have failed to set the market alight because they don’t quite offer the best of both worlds at the right price, as promised. A number of factors have caused this; [snipped] too low a ratio of flash memory to HDD space. Nevertheless Toshiba has decided to enter the market and perhaps will be able to hit the price/performance sweet spot more accurately, learning from Seagate’s mistakes.

The new Toshiba range are 9.5mm units so can’t be used within a sleek Ultrabooks or similar chassis. The 1TB top capacity beats the Seagate Momentus XT 750GB top end model but has the same amount of flash NAND (8GB), also the HDD component is only a 5400RPM part compared to the Momentus XT 7200 RPM spinning disc.

Maybe I'm being unspeakably stupid but I fail to see how Toshiba has "learned from Seagate's mistakes" - they haven't slimmed down the drive, haven't increased the amount of SSD space, and saddled it with a slower HDD. So unless this new Toshiba drive is a lot cheaper than the Seagate equivalent then it doesn't seem worth considering. Only plus point is the increased space.

Personally, I quite like the idea of the hybrid disk, and seriously considered a pair for a RAID1 array that I have for putting my virtual machines on - figuring that the SSD component might deliver better performance with my VM's than a conventional HDD would.

That said, I downsized my laptop disk space recently - going from 300GB HDD to 128GB SSD and haven't regretted the decision for a second.

[=assassin=]

I was briefly tempted by the Seagate drive, but I'm a bit put off by the fact that there are so few hybrid drives like that around, and concerned about reliability of using the SSD flash memory for this purpose, as it has a limited number of writes, so using that as a cache is surely a bad idea? It would effectively end up doing more writes than most standard SSD drives surely?