Seagate Discontinuing 7200 Notebook HDDs

David Burks, director of marketing and product management at Seagate Technology, was quoted as saying the following: "We are going stop building our notebook 7200rpm hard disk drives at the end of 2013." These high-level product managers are responsible for looking way out into the future in order to shape ongoing product ranges, and this is almost certainly going to spark a trend where HDD makers begin to phase those out in favor of flash-based alternatives.

The company will continue to offer 5400rpm HDDs for value notebooks.

The plans are to cease production of mobile hard drives with 7200rpm spindle speed late this year as the mainstream market demand will shift to different products, such as solid-state hybrid drives (SSHDs).

The 1st attempt by Seagate to acquire OCZ fell through but OCZ has recently stated "Acquisition Is Still a Strategic Option for Us".

 

Hybrid drives have such a small flash cache that they're hardly worth bothering with. If they're going to use a 7200 RPM spindle on the Momentus XT's while phasing out other 7200 RPM HDD's, it gives greater product differentiation and I can see that making sense from a business standpoint, but if the hybrids use a 5400 RPM spindle as well, they better bump up the cache at least four-fold.

 

I think this makes sense. Higher-end notebooks that would need faster HDDs are now using SSDs with the lower price of flash memory, so the only point of an HDD is large, cheap storage. If this is in a secondary drive, 5400RPM is plenty fast enough, particularly for sequential transfer speeds. In low-cost laptops, going forward we'll likely see a split between large and slow HDDs for undemanding usage and small SSDs for more mobile budget platforms.

 

I am using a Hybrid 750gb Seagate and it is FAST.
I did not think it would be a big difference but wow Windows loads up very quickly.
I did a rough count from when it says starting windows to the login screen and got 20 or 22 seconds.

I would love to see these hybrids with say 1gb of ssd memory.
Then we get the best of both worlds.

 

They have 8GB of cache already... However, that's not really enough to use for fast booting and gaming on one drive. I'd say 32 GB would be a minimum for that kind of usage, and a manual element to the caching would be nice as well, so you could get your games and important programs cached the first time you use them and keep other stuff off the cache.

 

I still think hybrid drives are a moot point now. In order to have any decent improvement the amount of on drive cache should be at least 32GB if not more. With mSATA's gaining popularity and prices dropping, it would be so much better to have a 64GB mSATA drive to install what you wish on it, and have a separate 2.5" 5400RPM HDD, the two of those combined would likely cost similarly to a hybrid drive, but give the user flexibility over size of mSATA and what they want to use it for. Sure if you want your computer to boot fast and that's it, then the hybrid drive is ok. But for loading and general workload response times, nothing beats a true SSD even if it's a slower mSATA.

I mean today you can get a Crucial M4 64GB mSATA SSD for about $80 + $80 for 750GB 7200RPM HDD = $160 vs Momentus XT 750GB = $160. Heck you can find 120-128GB mSATA drives for not much more than $100 now. I'd prefer that route over a hybrid any day.

Platter density has not improved considerably in laptop HDD's so SSD's are slowly catching up, granted cost is still high, but within the next couple years we will likely see 500GB drives for about $150 on a regular basis.

 

Shopping around, I found 500 GB 7200 RPM Momentus drives for about $110. So there's still a value to be had, although I agree with you on the cost to performance ratio; a 64 GB mSATA plus a comparable platter drive as the aforementioned hybrid would only cost around $150 and yield far better performance.

This seems like a logical move on Seagate's end given that. Hopefully they bring down the cost on the hybrid's subsequently though.

 

What about 2.5" HDD data servers???

 

Do such things exist? I'm sure enterprise drives can still be had through WD. Although most data servers that want speed utilize 3.5" drives.

 

I was under the impression that any 2.5" drive higher than 9.5mm is for data servers. Can't think of any other use for them

 

You still have Toshiba, Hitachi, and Western Digital anyhow.

 

Can always get good old 10,000 RPM Velociraptors in the 2.5" format.

 

2.5 inch drives are actually an advantage in Data servers vs 3.5 inch models, especially 10,000rpm ones since they have small platter sizes that dramatically decrease seek time. You can get some pretty epic Random IO performance from an array of short-stroked 10,000rpm or 15,000rpm 2.5 inch drives. That being said, this is a dying breed as SSDs get more affordable.

 

10000 and 15000 RPM 2.5" drives are small in storage volume, and nearly as expensive as consumer level SSD. Granted SLC is still king for high volume of writes, which is quite expensive

 

I find this a little surprising but considering it's Seagate, good riddance. Worst 7200RPM consumer notebook hard drives on the market in terms of quality.

 

Third gen Momentus XT is out, and it's 5400RPM...I wonder if performance will be worse than the second gen?

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I hope the second gen finally gets that promised write caching firmware, since the third has it.

 

I also don't like Seagate drives because they incorrectly report Read / Seek errors (in SMART) and I've had 2 drives with bad sectors.

But why do you say that their 7200rpm notebook drives are the worst in terms of quality?

 

Following up on the OP: Seagate ships its first desktop hybrid drive, third-gen laptop models

 

8GB NAND still? They need at least 16GB. 8GB read, 8GB write. That way the full 8GB can be used for the predictive storage reads, and 8GB buffer for writes. 8GB for write is plenty for users, except for the rare copying of 100GB of data, it would seem almost like an SSD.

 

Third-gen Momentus XT sounds disappointing, though I can't be sure how performance will really change.

But, I think the original MSRP of the 2nd-gen 750GB XT was above $200, whereas the third-gen 1TB XT is $99. I know the 2nd-gen was inflated due to the floods in fall 2011, but still it just seems like Seagate has compromised quality to bring the price down significantly.

 

Nothing. They don't use "7200rpm notebook HDDs." They use 2.5" enterprise drives.

 

I can get this. A 9.5mm 1TB drive with 8GB of cache for $99 is pretty nice, and you aren't overpaying for the cache like previous MomentusXT generations. I still think they should increase the cache to 16GB or 32GB and offer a manual cache utility for power users, but for $99 the 1TB drive is a heck of a deal.

 

I wouldn't be too sure about that. They're using MLC NAND instead of SLC NAND, and the mechanical drive is 5400 RPM instead of the previous 7200 RPM.

It's going to be a dropoff in performance and quality. How significant has yet to be seen.

 

Yes, but at $99 it's a legitimate alternative to other 2.5" 1TB drives, most of which are 5400 RPM and have no cache either, and many of which are thicker than 9.5cm.

 

I see it as a good move on seagate's part. Most of the 5400RPM 2.5 inch drives with really dense platters (e.g. 500gb platters) are within spitting distance of 7200rpm drive sequential speeds at a lower power consumption (I've only encountered one 7200rpm HDD with a 500gb platter and the performance advantage of the faster spindle was a measly 20mb/s). The main advantage of the 2.5inch 7200RPM drives was the lower access times which becomes rather mute with an NAND cache. By dropping the 7200RPM spindle speed, Seagate can definitely use the extra power budget to place more NAND on the drive. MLC was going to be a necessity due to the higher densities possible to allow more cache cheaply, if Seagate are concerned with endurance, they could always use eMLC for enthusiast drives which would give twice the Cache size at the same cost as SLC.

 

All manufs. should stop making HDDs and focus on SSDs .. I d like 500GB SSD for 100 quid ., :-D

 

And when I dream, I'd like a Ferrari.

 

pfff bourgeois

this is what happens when my cat dreams

I just dream a world where my mothers cat doesnt try to kill my sister

 

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Seems to be a small step down in performance, but still better than HDDs obviously.

Still, I'd be willing to pay a bit more for 7200 RPM and more NAND. But I don't know how feasible the latter would be.

At this point I may just try to get a 128 GB SSD and pair it with a 1 TB secondary HDD.