Seagate's hybrid laptop hard drives improve performance, keep price in check

By on May 21, 2010 at 8:48 AM
Hardware May 21, 2010

Seagate Hybird Webcast

Solid state hard drives are amazing. SSDs deliver a level of performance and stability that their spinning, magnetic counterparts simply can not compete with. The problem? The cost per gigabyte, at the moment, is off the charts. Enter Seagate’s new hybrid hard drives. The new disks combines a 4GB Nand flash chip, 32MB’s of cache, and a 250, 320, or 500GB 7,200 RPM 2.5-inch SATA drive to create this new class of drives. How’s performance you ask? Hybrids typically perform 80% faster than a standard 7,200 RPM disk and 20% faster than a standard 10,000 RPM disk. Although hybrids still aren’t quite as fast as full SSD hard disks — on average they are about 6 seconds slower — the cost per gigabyte is far more approachable. Currently, a 500 GB hybrid drive can be pre-ordered from PROVANTAGE for a manageable $133. Let’s review: $133 for a 500 GB laptop hard drive that is, in all likelihood, over 80% faster than what we are currently using…sign us up!

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  • Hollaman

    Typo “SSDs delivery” -> Deliver

    Friendly comment

    • Andrew Munchbach

      Thanks! Fixed.

  • Chuck

    Same thing that’s been going on with midrange servers for a while now. Put a large flash cache, and it removes the criticality of the spinning disc.

  • Mark Hernandez

    10,000 RMP -> 10,000 RPM.

    pre-order -> pre-ordered.

    “on average they are about 6 seconds slower” Uh, what does that mean? I’ve never heard of drive performance expressed this way. 6 seconds slower than what?

    It’s clear you are just banging this out too fast. Why?

    • Corey C

      6 seconds slower than a pure SSD.

      • Michael Knutson

        “on average they are about 6 seconds slower”

        … my guess would be boot time …

      • David

        pretty poorly written post all around.

    • Me

      I agree…Units please. Is that to transfer 1GB? Transfer 10GB? Anything at all….This really wasn’t breaking news. Why did the editor make such mind-numbing mistakes?

      Give us reduced seek times (which is what I expect the 80% reduction to be in), but is the 80% in seek times or what?

      This is really a hard drive with a very large non-volatile cache that keeps most accessed data in the cache. I like it very much, but this post was worthless in selling it to me…

  • Mike

    The difference between the fastest human is about 13 seconds faster than the slowest.

    Anyone see anything wrong with the above statement?

  • Grady

    I would rather be 6 seconds slower than 6 inches short!

  • Mark Hernandez

    Andrew sent me an email and said…

    “The “six seconds faster” quip came from the original article I used as my source — they did not specify what the initial benchmark was (boot time, seek time, etc.) — and, in hindsight, I probably should have just omitted it as it is a fairly useless clump of words that carries little/no meaning.”

    That was cool that Andrew acknowledged that he was being extra speedy today, but by responding it’s clear he’s not a hit-and-run writer, and he did come back to make the edits and talk to us. That means a lot.

    • Joey

      It does mean a lot. You should ask him out. ;-)

  • Peter

    Wasn’t this type of drive one of Vista’s new features Microsoft made a big deal about? Why has it taken so long to make one?

  • Petey

    wa wa wa he said 6 seconds faster i’m butthurt!

  • punter

    I just alter my laptop 160GB (7200) with a 500GB (7200) because of space, but performance had gone so worst boot time to ready was almost 45 minutes (Dell/XP) after an easy upgrade using the Apricorn wire device I replaced the drives, rebooted and was running in less than 2 minutes. Software, Hardware MUST be hardware since the SOFTWARE was exactly the same (Backup/Restore), Ran all the examined but no errors. When (not if) I have time will run stress tests on old drive. It increased cost in hard drives $100 at Frys ,so who cares about the old 160GB. http://laptop-hard-drive-enclosure.com/

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