What happens to regular HDDs when SATA-3 is mainstream?

Just curious. For notebooks, are we going to just keep seeing 5400rpm and 7200rpm drives come out or is there progress to be made for good old normal hard drives.

 

? Sata III mostly corresponds to limitation of Sata II on solid state drives. Don't expect much if any change for the mechanical hard drive as they have not been handicapped by Sata II...
There was an increase in cache size, and perhaps there may be a change of burst speed. But we'll see if that's even to be used.

 

Basically noting. Conventional hard drives are not bottlenecked by SATA II in any way so there's no point upgrading them to SATA III. They're compatible with SATA III though, as SATA III is backwards compatible with SATA I and II.

We're going to continue seeing new conventional hard drives being released. Both Hitachi and Seagate are close to releasing 750GB 7200rpm drives. Next step up will be 500GB per platter hard drives. I think we'll seem them in 2011.

I hope Seagate will release some new models to the XT line. I think they're in the sweet spot of the market at the moment.

 

I hope another company besides Seagate will release Hybrid HDD's soon. With at least 16gb of cache.

 

Agreed on more competition, that would be even better. I reckon the prices for the XT are still artificially high because of the lack of competition.

 

Yup. Also their support is in my opinion, one of the worst if not the worst in the hard drive market. They denied my RMA with 11 bad sectors/SMART saying it was bad simply because it would pass their seagate diagnostics utility. This is the main reason I steer clear from Seagate, that plus 4gb of SSD cache is pathetic and quite useless for things other then booting.

 

Can't agree with you there. Prior to using the XT I also believed 4GB wouldn't be enough. But it turned out to work very well for booting + several applications, like browsers, Office and Photoshop.

Only for users that use a larger amount of applications there'll be benefit from more than 4GB.

I think Seagate knew pretty well why they choose 4GB.

 

And I must unfortunately disagree with you on this one. I think the XT line is transitory at best. It's just an intermediary that will serve it's time, then vanish from production once full stability SSDs become mainstream. Still, only time will tell for sure.

An insignificant number that has been proven to be of no functional consequence.

 

I agree it might be transitory. But at the current prices and market, I think the XT is the sweet spot of price/performance.

SSDs with generous capacity are still too expensive in my opinion.

 

I will agree with Phil as far as hybrid HDD's are concerned. For the space/price they're good however 4gb is not enough. You may only get 2-3 non-browser programs in after boot sequences are cached. Sorry but 2-3 programs is not enough considering I play 2-6 games at any one day. Those games alone require 500mb-2gb of ram, in other words 500mb-2gb of cache for a truly fast SSD load.

Blah. Enough of that. I think 8gb should be the minimum for cache, 16gb being recommended. 32gb would be unrealistic, and would be better made into a SSD.

Seagate choose 4gb because that's the typical size of a 65nm~ NAND chip, increasing it to 8gb would increase the production costs by nearly 2 fold (less) for the SSD cache.

 

I think the momentus XT is like WD's raptor, a niche product that will remain so and never take off enough for even other companies to produce competing products.

 

In the Netherlands the XT 500GB is the most popular laptop hard drive (excluding SSDs).

I wouldn't be surprised if it's the same in the US.

 

As I stated, cache is inconsequential

 

With SATA III and the upcoming shrink in NAND die size 16GB starts to make sence for a future generation of Hybrid. A SATA III at 1 TB with a high speed 16GB NAND and 64 meg cache would make for an awesome drive for late 2011.

This could be stiff competition for a true SSD and at the time be offered for $200 or less, possibly even the price point of the XT right now. I think the XT with its pressent configuration is just the start. Seagate has definately proven the technology and the fact there is a definate market for the product and the want for larger-faster configurations of it..............

 

By what standard, aftermarket sales? That result is also skewed by the fact that in each category there are at least a handful of options, except for the momentus xt where it is the only one of its class.

 

Yes.

Not really imo. There are three models of the XT. The most popular after market hard drive in the Netherlands is the Seagate XT 500GB. Which doesn't necessarily mean it's the most sold, it's just the most viewed on the main price comparison site. (I don't have sales numbers)

The fact that only Seagate sells hybrid drives might even skew the number negatively for two reasons: first, because there's no competition prices are artificially high. Second, many people don't like Seagate and there for do not buy hybrid drives at the moment.

 

For one, I'm glad Seagate released the hybrid drive. I also believe that we will see other vendors with competing hybrid drives and with further optimizations and improvemnts. I would like to see WD utilize something like this in a desktop Raptor drive. Until SSD's cost close to the same as a mechanical hard drive of the same capacity, hard drives will continue to thrive, and as SSD's reduce in price, all the more reason to incorporate more and faster NAND for cache in a hybrid.

Because of the nature of notebooks too, since they are becoming smaller, thinner, and lighter, they typically house a single HDD or SSD, so you will always want best performance with most capacity. Heck, you may actually see hybrid SSD's with two separate SSD's incorporated into one, with one a super fast 32 or 40GB SSD and the other a slower, cheaper 128GB or 256GB, kind of like what they did with the first Eee's (4GB fast NAND + 8GB SLLLOOOWWW flash. All relative of course)

 

I don't think too much should be read into that then. The most popular drive in the Netherlands, other than SSD's, as determined by views on a major price comparison website doesn't tell us a whole lot about how well they are selling and how profitable they are. Also the fact that the Momentus XT has been out for a while, almost 6 months, and there hasn't been a peep from any other manufacturer doesn't exactly sound like this is a technology going mainstream any time soon.

But there are other reasons as well to doubt the rise of the hybrid drive. Outside of a few small "custom" laptop companies, no brand is really shipping these standard or even as an option on anything, right? So their sales are likely far less than traditional drives to begin with as they almost solely depend on retail sales. OEM's are going to go with what is cheaper, traditional 7200rpm drives in place of the costlier Momentus XT which although performs better, is not exactly an earth-shattering difference, especially for companies trying to reduce the cost of their laptops.

We can also compare the hybrid drive to the WD raptor, another advancement for hard drives that ended up being a niche item that no other manufacturers even wanted to compete with. It proved to be faster than any other drives, and I myself owned a first generation raptor. It was simple for WD to make; all they had to do was have one of their enterprise drives with a SATA connector instead of a SCSI connector. It had two things going for it over the Momentus XT and it still didn't really take off. It was the fastest, unlike the Momentus XT which gets blown away by SSD's. I was also easier and cheaper to make. WD, like the other manufacturers, was producing 10k rpm drives for the enterprise market, and it was producing drives for consumers using the SATA interface. It was a relatively simple and cheap job to mate the two. The Momentus XT likely costs Seagate a lot to make and develop relative to other drives, a cost that may not be reflected accurately in the price because it can only cost a small premium over conventional drives since it must be at a good price point between them and SSD's. If there were no SSD's, its price could be quite a bit higher as the "top performer."

I just do not think that the hybrid drive is a good venture for manufacturers and I would be shocked if it goes mainstream.

 

For the long term, I agree that hybrid's are not a good venture - but until SSD's can claim every last bit of ground that HDD currently excel at (price, capacity, reliability) then I would be shocked if it doesn't go mainstream.

 

Agreed, that's what I said.

Could be true, or maybe it takes more time for other manufacturers to produce a similar drive. I don't know.

As far as I know, some BTO brands are offering the option.

The fact that they are not offered standard doesn't say anything in my opinion. Look how long it took before before notebooks came with a standard SSD drive.

It will be interesting to see if Seagate remains the only company offering the hybrid option. I think it will depend a lot on the price development of SSDs. If prices go down very quickly, there will hardly be a market for hybrid drives.

 

The Momentus XT is just another evolution of an existing product (HDD) to stretch Product Life Cycle, so they can postpone the Saturation stage (decreasing profits).
SSD's are now in the Growth stage (increasing profits), which can be identified through the increasing amount of new market players.
That concludes my marketing lesson for today...

Bottom Line: Hard drives and/or hybrid drives will continue to exist as long as it is profitable, how long that will take is anyone's guess. It all depends on the price development of SSD's, like Phil said.
When SSD's finally reach a price/Gb that most consumers are willing to pay, they will eventually replace the mechanical hard disk drive (Hybrid or not). That is, if it doesn't get beaten to the finish by The Cloud.

The first quarter of next year will bring mass availability of SSD's with 25nm NAND (bringing prices down) and SATA III (removing the 3Gb/s bottleneck for SSD's). That could be a major turning point, but the (Hybrid) HDD is not dead yet.

 

i was skeptical about the xt myself until i finally got one.
it significantly sped up boot time. i use 6-10 programs for work, 3 programs for multimedia, and play a couple of games a day (if i have time).
for my work workflow, the xt helps since i open, edit , close my work programs multiple times in a day.
for games, and other seldom used programs, the xt seems to provide no perceptible performance benefits.

 

Aren't you the funny guy... Nobody cares what you state, no matter how often you state it, unless you have an argument to support your statement.

"The Cloud"? :laugh: Now that's a good one. Too much marketing kool-aid, I guess...