News - Seagate to breathe new life into hybrid storage solutions

[HEXUS]

Momentus XT Hybrid to combine the best of both hard-disk and solid-state media?

Read more.

[matty-hodgson]

Saracen? Maybe this is what you've been waiting for .

[this_is_gav]

Saracen? Maybe this is what you've been waiting for .

I somehow don't think it's going to be half the price of current SSDs.

[matty-hodgson]

I somehow don't think it's going to be half the price of current SSDs.

Only a £40 premium over a HDD without the SSD Hybrid thing though, £40 isn't much for a "150% increase."

[Irien]

Can't help feeling that 4Gb is not quite enough, given how much disk space a W7-64 install needs. 8Gb or 16Gb, and maybe we're getting somewhere (basically, I'd imagine you want all the OS boot files, and your favourite app exe's in flash). But it *does* sound an interesting idea for laptops where 2 drives isn't an option.

[Sim0n]

Irien,
But once windows has loaded, the drive wouldnt need 90% of the files stored into the 4Gb "buffer" suppose it depends how fast it "learns" and "forgets" ;

1. OK, ive loaded into windows now, i dont need those things anymore *trash*
2. Right, the user wants to play crysis, lets load the crysis profile, and go and cache all that stuff.
3. Trash the crysis stuff, looks like he wants to do some work now, load the MSOffice profile.

etc..

Now, with Windows7 better prefetch memory loading, between the 4Gb buffer and 4+Gb of ram, that should make a really fast system, with the benefit of a 500Gb drive behind it, all in a single drive.

Sounds nice to me

[TooNice]

I somehow don't think it's going to be half the price of current SSDs.

Remember, it's 3x the capacity at half the price. So effectively 6x cheaper per/GB. I am pretty sure that a 2.5" laptop HD is still about £1/GB so I doubt this would do at least without waiting a bit longer

[matty-hodgson]

I am pretty sure that a 2.5" laptop HD is still about £1/GB so I doubt this would do at least without waiting a bit longer

It's not £500 for a 500GB HDD :\.

[miniyazz]

It's not £500 for a 500GB HDD :\.

This, it's more like 10p/GB.

[watercooled]

Remember, it's 3x the capacity at half the price. So effectively 6x cheaper per/GB. I am pretty sure that a 2.5" laptop HD is still about £1/GB so I doubt this would do at least without waiting a bit longer

Nah, that was just the Xbox 360 HDD on release .

[crossy]

Can't help feeling that 4Gb is not quite enough, given how much disk space a W7-64 install needs. 8Gb or 16Gb, and maybe we're getting somewhere (basically, I'd imagine you want all the OS boot files, and your favourite app exe's in flash). But it *does* sound an interesting idea for laptops where 2 drives isn't an option.

4GB is fine for me - then again I'm using Linux, not some bloatware from MS!* I've got Ubuntu 64 bit on my main box (a laptop - since my Windows system is only for games these days) and I'm pretty sure that 4GB - if the caching is clever enough - will probably be enough to put the entire OS into the flash-resident area.

I've got a 320GB 7200rpm Travelstar in the lappie and it's getting a bit short of space, (AV work and program development uses a lot of space), so £107 for a drive that's going to be "better" sounds like a reasonable deal to me - think I'll wait until someone benchmarks the Seagate before I stump up the beer vouchers. I'm guessing that once it's been out for a while then that price is going to drop below the magic £100 mark.

* Actually cheap-shot penguin-advocacy aside, I'm going to have to bite the bullet and rebuild the Windows box to use that Win7Pro I bought many months ago sooner or later. So maybe replacing the current Seagate boot drive with one of these might be a good idea too.

Anyone offering a discount if I buy two?

Bob

[TooNice]

Yeah, my bad

So cheaper than the Velociraptor by quite a bit then.

Still, historically, based on the very few hybrid drives that's been made weren't great performance wise.