Seagate: "Hybrid Drives Will Outlive Solid-State Drives"

Hybrid Drives Will Outlive Solid-State Drives - Seagate - X-bit labs

 

They might outlive SSD on a case by case basis (based on today's technology), but the future is still SSD.

Good try Seagate, but no cigar.

 

Let's make that the far future..I'll be one of the single bay owners who want an SSD, yes, but I want all the CHEAP space in the trunk.

The question is will Seagate, WD and a few others BE in business when the SSD hit the sweet price point?

Samsung, and Intel would seem to be the solid state champions of the future?

 

Of course the company that has invested billions into spinning hard drive technology will say this... While it is possible that hybrids will outsell SSDs in the near future, SSDs will continually improve at a much faster rate than current spinning technology.

 

hybrids will 'improve' so quickly only because they are starting from zero.

This effect is well know to those who follow new tech introductions and is hardly a point for discussion or argument.

 

I think hybrids can work in laptops. In desktops when you can have multiply drives it makes sense to get a 120 gb SSD as the system and than a 1tb 3.5 inch hard disk for storage. But the SSD will not be used optimally.

In laptops mostly you only have one drive so a combination of both on a single drive makes sense to me.

I also like the smart management that seagate does. It seems to really work. If you but windows on a small ssd you are wasting a lot of space. There are many parts windows that are never launched or very rarely. It sits on the super fast ssd partition and is never used. Same for big programs like Office and Photoshop. You can install it on an SSD but the help files and templates that you hardly ever look at take up unneeded space and you are essentially paying extra for no reason. Also if you SSD as a system drive you should always keep some empty space so not to slow down the system. All this is not the case with the managed flash.

But the current 4gb is a little to low. I would think for most power users the sweet spot would be around 10GB. But this is only a guess, I am sure Seagate has done a lot of research. But I expect the next generation XT to double the flash memory to 8gb, maybe even 12 or 16GB for the highest capacity drives.

640gb with 8gb flash
750gb with 8gb flash
1tb with 12 or 16gb flash.

 

If they put out an article titled "hybrids will replace HDDs" then I could agree (maybe). As SSDs continue to improve there will come a point where it's just logical/cost effective to use an SSD as your main OS drive, leaving HDD's relegated to externals or optibay drives. Everyone would have an SSD in their computer if the prices weren't so high, the benefits are great. Hell, no moving parts means way less RMA's so I'd think manufacturers will jump all over them when the price is right.

 

MUMBO JUMBO.

That is the biggest load of crap I have heard in a while. Funny how the sole manufacturer of hybrid drives is also the sole source for such wild claims?

Phil, you should really jump off the Momentus XT bandwagon while you're still ahead.

 

It's an article by xbitlabs. Don't confuse it with my opinion.

 

Ok, ok. And I have nothing against the XT. I think it is a great little compromise that gives you performance roughly around the best 3.5" drives in a 2.5" package without paying a large premium. However, I just don't think it can be successful in today's market, regardless of what Seagate's propaganda says. I would like to see more hybrid drives come out from other manufacturers and for the technology to develop further, but I just don't see it happening.

 

I'm pretty sure the XT is successful at the moment as an after market upgrade. At the moment at least two laptops come with the XT. ( link)

When SSD prices come down enough I'm not sure if there's any place for hybrid products.

I think the title of the article is meant as "hybrid drives will have a longer phyisical life than SSDs". Which is probably true in general.

 

ya they'll outlive SSD's but for tose who want speed , there's still too slow...SSD's will always be bought...

 

That isn't how I read it. There's certainly a place for the XT at the moment, but sooner or later SSD technology will improve and take over. I reckon conventional HDDs will be around longer than hybrids.

We shall see.

 

You just contradicted yourself, sean... How exactly will they outlive SSDs if people will always buy SSDs? Also, hybrids use the same flash memory as SSDs. As for the capacity of the SSD in hybrids, the way Seagate designed it, 4GB seemed to be optimal in terms of price/performance as the user doesn't actually get to utilize the 4GB as a traditional drive.

 

Sean is going off of "outlive" by Phil's misreading of it from the original article.

The article uses the term outlive to mean that there will be a point in the future where SSD's are no longer sold but where we do have hydbrid dives continuing to be made and sold. Phil, and later sean473, read the "outlive" to mean that individual hyrbrid drives will last longer before failing than SSD's.

 

SSDs are the future, no doubt. In say a few years time, nobody will buy a traditional hard drive (who wants the click o'death). Besides the hybrid drives still have traditional hard drives which have moving parts. Anything with moving parts unless properly maintained will fail (and that's why you spend money making your car last).

 

FYI Seagate posted a response to this on their blog:
The real answer: Seagate CEO’s response to question about MacBook Air – The Storage Effect

 

lol @ "you get basically the features and function of SSD at more like disk drive cost and capacity"

Yeah I'm sure 4 ms latency = .1 ms....hrmm....

And solid state drives are NOT meant for storage. They are meant as a boot drive (at least for today's average consumer) and installing some of your applications on. So that would be comparing apples and oranges, sorry Seagate. And my 60 GB SSD was 140 with 20 MIR so it isn't that much more over a conventional hard drive, sure doesn't beat it for price per GB but I never intended for it to be like that.

 

Hybrid drives are alright, but the flash size needs to be bigger imo. Sending my Momentus XT back tomorrow. Frankly I didn't quite see the improvement I hoped. Start-up was ok, and so were launching certain apps, but it's a dog like every other Seagate drive I've used pulling things off the platters. They need to look at Western Digital drives and improve access times. Power consumption has also increased significantly now that the hdd's aren't spinning down with the current firmware.

What put the decision over the top for me is that I also need a company other than Seagate to produce one if I'm ever to seriously consider it. Have seen to many of their drives fail around me and sub-par customer service at that point. Bottom line is that I'm not comfortable having data on a Seagate hdd.

SSD's are getting cheap enough that I'll pull the trigger on one once we see what comes out Q4. Black Friday may be the time. It's now clear that a 40-64gb boot ssd + a low power 5400rpm ultrabay hdd is the win-win solution.

 

How convenient to forget hybrid has all the longevity disadvantages of mechanical mechanisms.

I'll say it before and now again: I have to write 3x the capacity of my X25M every day for 10 years for every cell to reach its 10k write limit. And that's pretty much all that's talked about in terms of failure (in more mature implementations of SSD anyway, first-to-market stuff always has bugs/quirks/flaws)

HDDs have a reputation of being extremely reliable over that kind of usage patterns do they? Lol @ biased crap article.

 

Momentus XT is sort of like readyboost. Just get some real RAM, and just get a real SSD.

Hybrid is OK for cars, but not computers.

 

Ah but you see, here's the problem. That's assuming you write continuous files. If you have a log file or some little file that's constantly updated, your SSD can die FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR sooner.

My Vertex 120GB has 40GB written to it and at 33 cycles (average), despite my best attempts to move all temporary files off it. With your assumption I would have had to write 33 * 120GB = 3.6TB to it to get it to this point, but instead 40GB did the trick.

To rewrite even one bit on an SSD, you have to rewrite the entire block, which is AFAIK something like 128-512kB. This is some 512*1000*8 = 4096000 times amplified. Poorly written programs may well have commands that say read file into memory, work with it, then rewrite the original even if it was adding 1 line to a 10kB log file.

There are people over at the OCZ forums who have already gotten about 4-5k cycles on their 120GB SSDs after only 4TB written to it.

To further clarify my point: Since I have 120GB on my SSD, writing 40GB should be 0.33 cycles. Instead, it's at 33 cycles. That's an entire 100 times more wear than suggested by the way you calculated it.

 

I'm not really seeing any longevity disadvantages to mechanical drives. Most of mine outlived their usefulness. Are mechanical drives prone to premature failure? No, they're not.

So, the X-bit labs article Phil posted that was ostensibly regurgitating exactly what seagate said, was actually just complete bull? I should have known...

 

Yeah, I agree with Trottel.

Mechanical drives are as stable as we can wish for.

Add the 'smart' nand that Seagate has done and they are even faster for certain tasks than my VRaptors in my desktop systems are.

I too hope other manufacturers get into the hybrid drives. I can only image what a 1TB Hitachi 7KS1000 with 32GB 'smart' nand would be like.

 

What drive are you comparing it to? Who are you sending it back to, may i ask?

As to your other comments, the drive has a 5 year warranty..you do back up right? I have had two RMA's through Seagate and have had great turn around and service.

cheers

 

a quick search on newegg of HDD's >=1TB shows a diffrent story... look at all the low rated Seagates... PROVE it seagate - build a more reliable HD.

 

Here is a quote from Steve Luzco (Seagate CEO) in the Seagate blog.

"I can tell you that my SSD drive takes about 25, 30 seconds to boot now versus the 12 seconds when I bought it, and that’s just an issue more related to OS than it is specifically to the technology, but again, with the hybrid, there’s things that you can do to alleviate that, so your boot times are actually as compelling one and two and three and four years down the road."

How do you alleviate constantly increasing boot times with the XT that are impossible with a true SSD? Flash memory is flash memory and file fragmentation & clutter are characteristic of all disk drives, mechanical or non.

If an OS will boot in the same amount of time after 4 years of use as when it's freshly installed and learned by the NAND, even with constant system maintenance and w/o reinstalling, that would be a real accomplishment! But since this is corporate CEO talk, 24 seconds is just as "compelling" as 12 when you're going from a pure platter hdd. The fact that it is harmful to the drive to reinstall a clean version of the OS (which is the only real way to get your quickest boot times back) is a negative for both the XT and any SSD. BTW, what SSD boots (presumably) Win 7 or 7 Starter in 12 seconds?!

If I remember, you said in the XT thread that you upgraded from a Scorpio Black. Is this what you're going back to?

There was a release from Intel that the G3 SSDs are delayed until Feb '11 (which I'm sorry to say is not going to result in a 60% in price reduction like some press releases claim ) but are there new Sandforce models coming out in 2010?

 

RWUK,

I can believe a Win7x86 12 second start time - with nothing else installed a HDD can almost match it.

As for re-installing an O/S being harmful, yes. It is for an SSD, but not for an XT hybrid.

An XT does not write things unless it decides to (when things have settled down, after the flurry of installing an O/S) - all SSD's must write, otherwise they are considered DOA.

 

The wAy i see it, hybrid drives will be the evolutionary replacement of tradititional hdds, whuch will be supllanted by the ssds once the technology matures even more.
The issues i have with the xt right noe are too small a nand, and lack of control on thr cache. It would be more optimal if the user could exclude/includ certain files/programs from the nand. Ex i use chrome and wmp a lot but i dont want them in the cache since they are fast already, and would rather save the space for something else.

 

Not counting POST, booting to Windows 7 in 12 seconds is believable, especially with RAID. He didn't explain the context of his SSDs.

And the newest SandForce SSDs were already released with SF1200 and SF1500 controllers. Unless you are talking about a newer controller..which I haven't heard of yet.

 

Are you sure that's accurate?

"if you have a 100GB SSD, you would rewrite the drive fewer than 1000 times in five years"
Demystifying SSD Endurance | StorageReview.com

SandForce Announces Next-Gen SSDs, SF-2000 Capable of 500MB/s and 60K IOPS - AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News

 

What I don't understand is what does it mean if 'hybrid drives outlive solid state drives'? So what? Whether you have a hdd, an ssd or a hybrid it doesn't matter. They only need to live as long as it takes for you to decide you want to replace them. They only need enough data retention for you to reasonably transfer all your important data to a new drive when you decide you want one.

When the drive fails before that point you are covered to a limited extent by warranty and with SSDs its easy to get 5 years coverage. But what if the drive fails outside warranty? :O Answer these 2 questions as truthfully as you can:

1) How many times in the past 10 years have you changed your primary storage disk? Be honest now.
3) How many times in the past 10 years have you replaced a functioning primary storage disk?

My answers:

1) 5.
2) 5.

What does this mean? It means I've never replaced a hard drive due to hardware failure. I have never availed of warranty. I have always replaced a hard drive whilst the previous one was working because I wanted more capacity or more speed, or less noise and heat.

On the subject of ssd write endurance: I don't know where you guys are getting your numbers from because in 54 days I have 320gb worth writes and 896gb worth of reads on a 120gb SSD. So that works out at an average of less than 6gb of writes per day.

A large amount of those writes occured in the first week when I was installing everything and then came the benchmarks. At least 3 runs with AS-SSD and 3 runs with CDM using random test data, 5 passes of 100mb per test. I also ran ATTO at least once. Nearly half of the writes to the drive to date are one offs since I don't plan on reinstalling/reimaging or benching again any time soon. Thus the daily average should go down. I highly recommend tracking writes rather than 'eyeballing' it because alot of people have a really weird idea of how much they are actually writing to disk.

Secondly, whilst it is true that SSDs have a wear out 'cliff', it is largely irrelevant provided the spike in failure rate as a result of reaching 100% of the drive's write endurance occurs beyond the time in which you expect to replace the drive.

Part of this is to do with planned obsolence but with SSDs you can always buy more write endurance if you need it. You either go with a higher capacity drive, an enterprise class drive or a higher capacity enterprise drive. A single user will never realistically reach exceed the write tolerance of those things before they build cars that can fly.

 

SSDs don't have a wearout "cliff". Assuming normal distribution of failure times centered at the expected endurance value (10k writes) the SSD will GRADUALLY die, starting with less and less cells capable fo accepting writes. This is of course assuming the controller isn't defective. It would be a cliff if the SSD suddenly decides to no longer be recognized or something.

Also, I'm not eyeballing anything, I'm using the program called IndilixSSDStatus to track. It says I have 47GB writes and at 34 cycles.

There is a general misconception here. When the manufacturer says the drive is capable of 10k writes, it does NOT mean that you can write 10k * drive size to the drive before it fails. That is under OPTIMAL conditions where the files are CONTINUOUS. If you are writing SMALL files or doing small MODIFICATIONS to files (which are typical in an OS environment), the drive WILL DIE MUCH SOONER. This is due to the concept of BLOCK SIZES of 128kB - 512kB that must be erased for you to CHANGE the contents of even one 1 BYTE file.

 

Isn't all of this dependent on the controller? I mean there are some better and worse controllers out there.

I have noticed with my 5 year old 1 GB flash drive that write speed is gradually slowing which use the same flash NAND technology as SSD. But in 5 years SSDs will drop the prices even average consumers will buy over a traditional HDD and hybrids.

 

Can you show me where I can buy my flying car? I'd like a red one please.

 

SSD's are WAY too far from being "mainstream". There's too many issues at the moment, and way too expensive. I own five SSD's. Out of those five, I've had two fail, I hardly call that reliable. And have one that needs to be secure erased periodically to regain performance, and that's an Intel drive (yes, TRIM *IS* enabled, aligned, etc). I've had too many hard drives to count, and have had maybe one fail in the last ten years. And performance issues? Defragmenting usually does the trick.

Let's not forget about server storage and even home storage. I can buy a 2TB hard drive for $100. What SSD can I get for $100? Maybe a 60-64GB. There will always be a need for mass storage, and until SSD's can meet same price per GB, they will remain. You couldn't even create a super slow SSD at 2TB for $1000, let alone $100.

I'm not anti-SSD but all I'm saying is that SSD's have a LONG way to go before they replace hard drives in any capacity, and hybrid looks like a good long term interim fix. Not to mention laptops gaining marketshare, and most house only a single drive, and not everyone is ready to compromise space for speed, since most people are used to the massive drives available cheaply.

I can definitely see where Seagate is coming from.

 

What do you mean by fail? BIOS not recognizing the drive? The SSD exploding in your face? Slower write speeds?

And look at how hard drive space has evolved from 10 years ago. We had 20-40 GB drives. Now 3 TB consumer drives have come out and prices have been slashed. You can get a 1 TB drive for like 50 bucks on sale. SSDs will follow the same path.

And I thought you weren't supposed to defragment a drive, or did you mean garbage collect?

 

fail = dead. Cannot be read, does not exist to the machine. One an OCZ, one a Kingston. Both worked fine for a while then the system wouldn't boot, couldn't even get any machine to recognize the drives. For drives that claim to have two million plus MTBF, I must be super unlucky, or those claims are false. In theory SSD reliability sounds great, no moving parts, but I have yet to have a hard drive fail me in the last ten years. Prior to that it wasn't uncommon, but these days not so much.

I was referring to hard drives as far as addressing performance issues and defragging, not SSD's.

I think people are a little too optimistic regarding pricing of SSD's. Unless hard drives meet a storage density bottleneck, SSD's will always be more expensive. I'd bet to say it will be at least ten years before SSD's are a good all around replacement for hard drives in a consumer capacity. And by then we'll probably see cloud computing starting to take hold, so by then you won't need as much local storage.

 

The controller's just an IC like the CPU in your phone. Unless there's a manufacturing defect, no, it will not break.
The NAND storage medium breaks down a bit each time the value in it is changed. That is what limits the write cycles.

 

If an OS is reinstalled or defragged on an XT, the placement of the cached files and their relationship to the non-cached will change so it must rewrite those files to construct its new cache. Is this correct? I would assume this rewriting would still be harmful to the NAND because it is still writing.

What if the cache dies/malfunctions/etc. on an XT, can the whole hdd still operate or at least be read as an external?

All this aside, I think it's ridiculous that people worry about writing as little as possible to a disk because it degrades the life of it. People's concern is surely understandable but that such limited write cycles is a fact of a $500 hdd is just silly. It is a hard drive, the nature of the device includes writing! Then again, I suppose buying $600 bottle of champagne doesn't mean one needs to drink it. However some nice bubbly doesn't come with a warranty. I completely understand that SSDs are for certain niches but the price and practicality are what bump me out of line to buy one.

The SF2000 drivers are what I was thinking of, thank you Phil for the link. I can't easily imagine the CEO of a company like Seagate to have a Raid setup for his SSD, that's too geeky for a top level businessman. Plus he refers to 'it' and not 'them' when talking of the drive. Still, 12 seconds is very impressive even if it is only under rare circumstances.

 

To be fair, I dont think Hybrid drives will outlast SSD's in terms of the future and terms of how long the technology will be with us, but I do think they could supplant the normal HDD, especially for laptops which in many cases only have one HDD bay.

By providing a reasonably sized, highly speedy cache element, they can provide some of the benefits of an SSD, such as speedy boot times, by leveraging the low access times and high read speeds of tiny boot files that take much longer to access and read under traditional methods, and also act as an extremely fast cache for more commonly used sections of code/files (much like the cache on a processor) to prevent constant HDD access at times.

That said, as a technology, I think SSDs are ultimately the way forward, even if they are still quite immature, but obviously that is dependant on memory density/£:GB improving, and the niggles (such as rapidly declining performance in some circumstances without a secure erase periodically) being eliminated or reduced.

As it stands HDDs aren't as fast, but they are dependable and relatively cheap, so I cant see them dissappearing for a while yet.

Reminds me, next time I reinstall Windows on my laptop, I'll have to secure erase the SDD, I've already noticed performance isn't as hot as it was when I first got it. Ironically, despite these niggles, I've just ordered a relatively cheap Vertex 2E for my HTPC, as not only will it be silent and run cool, it'll also be subject to quite limited writing, as all the media is stored on an external drive and it'll only be used as a boot drive, with HTPC software on, so overall usage will be quite low.

 

I could also see hybrid SSD drives. A smaller super fast drive as either a cache or as a separate "drive" that also has a much higher capacity yet slower SSD for storage on the same 2.5" form factor.

 

Does a secure erase actually write everything to zeros like Killdisk or DBan?


Does anyone know if the XT shows signs of slowing without having the cache reset? Seems like it does not but one would think that as the NAND approaches full capacity, it would become less responsive. I've not seen this mentioned anywhere for the XT so maybe 4GB really is enough to allow overhead for what the firmware decides to go into the flash memory.

 

eggzactly!

 

I believe so, and sets everything in as optimal position it can be for use from fresh, but Im a relative noob to SSD so I could be wrong!

 

I wouldn't think so, but I think that's mostly due to a difference in the way things work between the 2. I'm fairly certain that one of the main reasons SSDs slow down is actually due to writing, not reading. Thus SSDs slow down as they fill because when they have to write to the flash, they have to write over more flash than they had to in the beginning (due to the nature of blocks being half-filled). When an XT writes (normally), it doesn't write to flash; it writes to the platters. The flash is written to during "idle" time, and thus you should never notice when the flash is being written to. Remember, you have no control over the flash in an XT. As far as you're concerned, the only time you can tell when flash is being used in an XT is when it is faster than usual, which happens well after the flash has already been written to, and reading from flash doesn't slow down as the drive is filled.

 

Notice he states "Hybrid drives" meaning most likely the XT is not the final say in the intended offereings. The XT as configured was a good launch point and place for manufacturer(s) to test the waters.

If there is a 1TB with 32GB NAND out there for APR. $250 offereing 90% the performance of an SSD in 9.5mm format how many true SSD's would get sold. You have to rememeber too at 32GB the algorythm could be made stonger to hold files longer before tossing them too making programs run even better. You could even say there could be a 64GB NAND and look at $350 or so with 98% SSD performance.

The other thought will be future systems like netbooks or other devices wanting to use 1.8 drives. Hybrids could be a super boon to those as well. I am sure in the not too distant future hybrids offer the best possability of becoming mainstream offerings in higher end laptops or at least a mainstream offering before that of SSD's becoming so.

We present XT users are early addopters, compare this to early SSD addopters. Things are bound to improve and offerings will be greatly enhanced. For those not getting a real boost from the pressent XT's don't sweat it, just like early SSD's not helping everyone out at first the Hybrids will eventually catch up to you too..........

 

Awesome point...

For me it comes down to this: In every case there are those to through too much enthusiasm into an idea at the start, and those who refuse to accept that the new is anything more than a fad...

SSD's are revolutionary, but I don't think they will become dominant until $/Gb flash ~ $/Gb magnetic. Its that simple...and thats quite a bit away from where I'm standing...

 

Well this raises the question om how much memory can be stuffed on the 9.5 drive chassis? Would the 32/64 GB NAND controller be the same size as the current 4GB?

 

The XT, as is, is just not for everyone. It leaves much to be desired in some areas. On that same note for general purpose use it is a great drive. The true performance sector, which SSD's sell too, will require quite a bit more. I am sure there are those exact plans.

Most manufacturers are most likely waiting for the impending die shrinks of NAND before jumping in the hybrid market. Even Seagate would be prudent to wait for them before the next offereings. No sence putting to market old and more expensive tech. Actually they may be waiting to even put to pre-beta development for the new chips.

I somehow severly doubt our XT's in their current configuration is the last we will hear of Hybrids and I look forward to future offereings............

Current chips would be undoubtably larger, the impending die shrinks would/should reduce this substantially though. Another note is now this pressents the possability of multiple chips meaning they could also on board raid them with a controler for much faster over all NAND..................