Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid HDD w/ built-in 4GB SSD

[Charles P. Jefferies]

This is interesting:
Seagate brewing bizarre Flash/Platter chimera ? The Register

A Greek website is reporting that a combined solid state and spinning disk drive may be on the way from Seagate.

The hw box story says the hybrid Momentus XT will combine a 4GB solid state drive (SSD) with a 7200rpm rotating hard disk offering 250, 320 or 500GB of capacity.

There will be a 32MB cache, a 3Gbit/s SATA interface, and native command queuing (NCQ). The article mentions an 80 per cent performance improvement over a 7200rpm hard drive on a PCMark Vantage test.

Targeted devices for the flash-using Momentus XT are notebooks, workstations and small form-factor desktop PCs.

Thoughts?

I am mostly interested in pricing. I don't imagine it will be that much more than a regular drive but it will still fetch a premium.

[namaiki]

Would that appear as a single drive, or two drives to the user?

If I don't wanna look silly, I'm guessing a single drive with lots of magic going on in the background?

[laststop311]

so does it use the 4gb of ssd as like a huge cache to speed up data access?

[Charles P. Jefferies]

so does it use the 4gb of ssd as like a huge cache to speed up data access?

At first I thought so but the drive has a 32MB cache.

I am guessing that the drive will show up as a single drive to the user, however the controller on the drive will fill the SSD with front-end data such as the OS.

Kind of like this:
SilverStone Technology Co., Ltd - Designing Inspiration

[Cape Consultant]

Just like that Intel crap of adding ram by sticking in a USB stick this will die on the vine. No thanks Seagate, we do not want this.

This will never take off, mark my words. Seagate is mishandling the whole SSD thing incredibly badly.

[TechAnimal]

Thats crap. The only way an idea like this is useful is with at least 32GB of SSD storage. What exactly am I supposed to do with 4GB? I'd rather just get extra RAM.

[Pitabred]

Thats crap. The only way an idea like this is useful is with at least 32GB of SSD storage. What exactly am I supposed to do with 4GB? I'd rather just get extra RAM.

4GB will hold Windows critical files, and maybe a few program files.

I agree though, that 4GB isn't enough. It may however be better than nothing, especially if it's managed by the drive and is invisible to the user. It'll just make things go faster.

[Cape Consultant]

I still say Seagate has been freaking brain dead when it comes to SSD's. I cannot WAIT for the WD BLACK SSD already announced. Come on WD!!

[t30power]

4GB maybe would be ideal for XP, but for Windows 7 the installation directory takes a lot more than 4GB, and what's the point on having only some files on the SSD portion.
IMO the only 'way' this could be interesting to users if if the pricing is right.
But I'm paranoid to even use a Seagate drive again, not sure if those would yield a reasonable no fail record.

[ViciousXUSMC]

I see it being like the hdd version of ready boost. Not sure how it will work with the SSD integrated. Probably will be a slow SSD and just try to take page file commands and other stuff.

I wonder how it knows when to put stuff on the HDD and take it off the SSD, and if there is a lot of potential for data loss/corruption and how normal every day stuff like defragmenting the disk will work.

I dont think it will work all to well, but guess we wont know until (if) it comes out.

Thinking about it, I see how it could be setup as a "gateway" for writes. Every bit of data can go to the 4GB SSD first and immediately it starts to send data from the SSD to the HDD in a streaming fashion. As long as you do not fill that entire 4GB size up you can keep the SSD speed. If you were installing a 7GB game and it managed to fill the 4GB up you would slow to HDD speeds until the SSD streams enough data off to free up. Even with the 7GB game it would not be 4GB fast and 3GB slow, chances are the HDD can pick up the stream fast enough that the SSD will only be full for 1GB or so of the install time.

This double work though means more things to fail on the drive and more work your cpu will be doing coordinating the data.

So yeah that would work for write... but the main reason we use SSD is READ I think, and since the majority of the data will still be on the HDD, there is no way to really reverse the gateway idea I just came up with because the HDD is still the slowest link.