Seagate launches 2TB FireCuda mobile SSHD

[HEXUS]

This is a hybrid drive with 8GB of flash and Seagate's latest Multi-Tier Caching tech.

Read more.

[excalibur1814]

One of the cad guys, working here, purchased one of the older models. He does like the drive but it has had a whole load of issues so he's no longer using it as his system drive. Wait a little bit before buying these, check the support forum(s) and look for the firmware before deciding to place your critical data into the hands of a drive like this.

[Valantar]

Sorry, I must have misread. A 5TB 7mm 2.5" drive? What? That can't possibly be true. If so, where are the 20+TB 3,5" drives with the same platter tech?

[realstock]

Hybrid drives, are a waste of money imo, who on earth buys them?!

Its not as if SSDs are expensive anymore, with 500GB costing around £100 upwards. Pointless!

[Irien]

Sadly it looks like they have hamstrung this with 8Gb flash - just like the old drives. Indeed, a cynic might say these *were* the old drives rebadged.

The thing is, the technology ought to be good - a 500Gb with 32-64Gb of flash, a 1tb with 64-128 or a 2tb with 128-256 would be really sweet, giving capacity and speed and allowing for large applications/games to take advantage of copious storage and the benefits of flash. If things are price sensitive, use 16-64gb, but 8 simply isn't enough.

They also seem unwilling to make really large hybrid drives - 4Tb-8Tb. I'd have thought that the real market for these drives was where storage capacity outweighed flash value - eg. 2Tb+, yet 2Tb seems to be the max size offered, even in 3.5" factor (there may be a 4Tb slow-rpm drive).

I'm using a 2Tb one that I won in a Hexus comp (three cheers for Hexus!) and it has worked well as a secondary data/game drive. It is 80% full, but seems nippier than ordinary hard drives. The tech has merit, but it seems like manufacturers aren't willing to move with the times spec-wise. 8Gb of flash was a big deal 4-5 years ago when the first hybrid drive launched. Now, it is probably the smallest size flash chip produced.

[Dashers]

I know plenty of people who buy hybrids. They're good for people who want space, but don't want to spend the money on two drives. Even budding enthusiasts who don't have a good income.

[crossy]

Hybrid drives, are a waste of money imo, who on earth buys them?!
Its not as if SSDs are expensive anymore, with 500GB costing around £100 upwards. Pointless!

If you can squeeze your content into <500GB then I'll agree with you. However, if we're talking about a more realistic sizing - say 1TB - then the SSHD's are a good intermediate step between a "normal" HDD and a full-on SDD. To put it into perspective, on the same website you can have 1TB of normal HDD space for £40, or an SSD for just over £230, with the SSHD slotting in at just over £70. So, while putting OS and even Apps partitions on an SSD is a "no brainer" these days, then your data/media libraries could very well justify an SSHD ... at least until you can stump up the moolah for a full-on SSD solution.

Me personally, I'm running SSD's for OS and Apps, with an older generation Seagate SSHD doing the honours for my user data, and multimedia library. I've found the SSHD to be a noticeable improvement on the WD Black that preceeded it.

Oh and speaking of the Black, if you want "pointless" then look up the WD Black^2 ... a dumb "Heath Robinson" lash up if I ever saw one.

I'm using a 2Tb one that I won in a Hexus comp (three cheers for Hexus!) and it has worked well as a secondary data/game drive. It is 80% full, but seems nippier than ordinary hard drives.

+1 on this

The tech has merit, but it seems like manufacturers aren't willing to move with the times spec-wise. 8Gb of flash was a big deal 4-5 years ago when the first hybrid drive launched. Now, it is probably the smallest size flash chip produced. The thing is, the technology ought to be good - a 500Gb with 32-64Gb of flash, a 1tb with 64-128 or a 2tb with 128-256 would be really sweet, giving capacity and speed and allowing for large applications/games to take advantage of copious storage and the benefits of flash. If things are price sensitive, use 16-64gb, but 8 simply isn't enough.

Again, I'll agree totally with what you're saying. However, it's interesting to me that WD also limit their SSHD drives to a mere 8GB of flash, which makes me wonder if this is either (a) a limitation of their caching algorithms or (b) that they've bought the same design from a 3rd party. As to the size of that cache, if you use microSD cards as a guide then quadrupling the flash cache - so 8GB to 32GB - is going to add about £5 (or about 7%) to the overall cost.

They also seem unwilling to make really large hybrid drives - 4Tb-8Tb. I'd have thought that the real market for these drives was where storage capacity outweighed flash value - eg. 2Tb+, yet 2Tb seems to be the max size offered, even in 3.5" factor (there may be a 4Tb slow-rpm drive).

Okay, and here I'm going to disagree, if you check the following links (from Scan) you'll see that there's two 4TB Seagates offered (kit and bare drive) along with a WD 4TB Blue unit (here).

Actually in the course of checking what the difference between the two Seagates that Scan was offering I found something strange - according to the spec sheet on the Seagate site (here) the later DX model SSHD is 200g heavier than the earlier kit-included model. Is Seagate using heavier platters?

Second interesting thing is, as you point out, that the newer FireCuda's seem to drop the larger size - I can't help wondering if that decisions come from the engineering or the finance departments.

[Valantar]

To answer one of my own questions, the article is wrong. The 7mm 2,5" drives top out at 2TB, and you'll have to go 15mm for 5TB. I'm really not complaining, though. 5TB in a 2,5" drive is amazing, no matter the thickness.


As for SSHDs, I see the appeal, but the miniscule amounts of flash make them pretty meaningless in my eyes. An 8GB cache means that you - at best - can fit the most used OS files and a few key application files there. Tops. Not to mention that there's no room for parallelism or anything to make the flash perform like it could. For mass storage (non-OS drives) SSHDs make little sense, as the nature of this kind of storage (mostly writes, and reads of various semi-random large files (such as watching a movie or going through a photo album)) doesn't jive well with pre-caching.

The WD Black^2 was a great idea that lacked the tech to actually work. Showing up as two separate drives? That's just weird. Microsoft should really cobble together a caching system like the one Apple has.

[DanceswithUnix]

Again, I'll agree totally with what you're saying. However, it's interesting to me that WD also limit their SSHD drives to a mere 8GB of flash, which makes me wonder if this is either (a) a limitation of their caching algorithms or (b) that they've bought the same design from a 3rd party. As to the size of that cache, if you use microSD cards as a guide then quadrupling the flash cache - so 8GB to 32GB - is going to add about £5 (or about 7%) to the overall cost.

I notice the Toshiba SSHD drives are also 8GB of flash.

MicroSD cards are probably a bad price guide, if you look at mobile phones then eg going from Xperia M4 8GB to 16GB costs £11 which is a fair chunk of the HDD price.

One of the major factors of an SSD for some people is the boot time, and 8GB should be enough to speed booting and perhaps buffers a few writes to flash before having to spin up the platters and hence save some battery life and noise. Most PCs these days are laptops, and this is ideally a laptop technology.

[crossy]

As for SSHDs, I see the appeal, but the miniscule amounts of flash make them pretty meaningless in my eyes. An 8GB cache means that you - at best - can fit the most used OS files and a few key application files there. Tops. Not to mention that there's no room for parallelism or anything to make the flash perform like it could. For mass storage (non-OS drives) SSHDs make little sense, as the nature of this kind of storage (mostly writes, and reads of various semi-random large files (such as watching a movie or going through a photo album)) doesn't jive well with pre-caching.

The WD Black^2 was a great idea that lacked the tech to actually work. Showing up as two separate drives? That's just weird. Microsoft should really cobble together a caching system like the one Apple has.

Ooo, totally disagree here. First the WD Black^2 - if that was such a good idea (which it isn't) then where's the new models? To me any disk that was not only completely reliant on software to work, but also that the aforementioned software was of dubious reliability (look it up), isn't something that I'm going to waste any money on.

Secondly while an SSHD for a media only drive is not a good use, (agreeing with you), I've seen good cache hits when my user home directory has been on SSHD. I'm assuming that there's frequently used parts of the user space that the login process uses, because there's a noticeable reduction in login times between SSHD and HDD hosted users.

[shaithis]

Happy with a hybrid in my PS4 and if I required a lot of storage in my laptops I would consider one for that also.....but any device that accepts multiple drives will never have a hybrid in. Wish they would up the flash component in them though.

[Valantar]

Ooo, totally disagree here. First the WD Black^2 - if that was such a good idea (which it isn't) then where's the new models? To me any disk that was not only completely reliant on software to work, but also that the aforementioned software was of dubious reliability (look it up), isn't something that I'm going to waste any money on.

There have been no new models because the exact same problems are still there: there is no good "use a separate SSD as a giant cache" solution in Windows. And I heard about the reliability issues of the WD software - probably another reason for there to be no updated version. I very much doubt WD has the resources to R&D a bootable semi-universal secondary drive caching system. If the software existed, though, the idea would be great. A firmware/controller based solution would probably be even better, but even harder to implement. And the growing size and shrinking prices of SSDs is making solutions like this more and more obsolete.

Secondly while an SSHD for a media only drive is not a good use, (agreeing with you), I've seen good cache hits when my user home directory has been on SSHD. I'm assuming that there's frequently used parts of the user space that the login process uses, because there's a noticeable reduction in login times between SSHD and HDD hosted users.

I don't doubt that. If the caching algorithm does its job, a subset of all frequently used files should be in flash. The problem is just that 8GB is far, far from enough for anything besides basic use. Sure, it helps, but even as little as 32GB of flash would be a huge boost compared to this.

[Irien]

I believe both the 4Tb drives mentioned (and not mentioned re Firecuda) used 5400 speed core hard drives. I recall this because it stood out like a sore thumb when I was looking. Whilst the SSD caching will help, I didn't fancy dropping to 5400 on cache-misses.

[wazzickle]

I'm in the market for exactly this sort of thing at the moment - my HTPC is currently using a noisy external 3TB HDD, I'd like the same or greater internal HDD (at 2.5" ff) and am willing to pay a little more for the speed boost that comes with being a hybrid, which I would expect will benefit me greatly given I intend to use it as storage rather than an OS.

[wazzickle]

Though tbh I don't know that much about these things, I'd be interested if someone could tell me that for my uses this would actually be more useful for me than for example a seagate laptop 4TB 2.5" HDD @ £180, or to wait for the 5TB Seagate Barracuda at an unknown price and release date. Probably have about 6 months before I fill up my current data so no rush.