
Seagate gets hybrid SSD/HDD right - twampss
http://storagemojo.com/2010/05/24/seagate-gets-hybrid-ssdhdd-right/
======
johnthedebs
These benchmarks are pretty useless. Sounds like a potentially good idea, but
I'll be impressed when I see real benchmarks demonstrating worthwhile
improvements.

He starts off by saying that boot times have gotten significantly _worse_.
Reinstalling the OS (not something I want to do) gets startup time back to the
same as with a standard HDD. So far so bad.

Secondly, application tests are completely unscientific and show a lack of
understanding of how the OS works. After you open an application the OS caches
it so that it opens more quickly next time. The startup improvements he's
seeing can be entirely attributed to this: Consider that on my MBP with a
5400rpm HDD Pages took ~7 seconds to start the first time and ~1.5 the second
time (using the same technique as the videos).

This is a better benchmark of the same drive, but I still think the conclusion
is too favorable without more thorough real-world tests:
[http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/seagate_momentus_xt_...](http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/seagate_momentus_xt_500gb/)

Edit: Spelling and slightly overzealous language.

~~~
slyn
When it comes to reviewing SSD's I don't think there is another source that
comes close to AnandTech.

[http://www.anandtech.com/show/3734/seagates-momentus-xt-
revi...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/3734/seagates-momentus-xt-review-
finally-a-good-hybrid-hdd)

TL;DR: The review is still favorable, just with more meat to back it up.

~~~
johnthedebs
Yeah, this is a much better review - thanks for pointing it out!

Don't know why I didn't think to check AnandTech. They're definitely among the
best at this.

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zerokyuu
Couldn't these huge speed ups be do to caching or space in inactive memory?
For example, you may quit Word or Final Cut, but if nothing else is grabbing
for memory aren't a lot of the needed libraries sitting there? I opened,
closed, and reopened a few applications on my Macbook Pro with my 500 GB HDD,
seems like they are way faster when I open them the second time... For
example, iTunes went from taking about 5 seconds to opening almost instantly..

~~~
pmjordan
That wouldn't help the boot times or cold app starts.

~~~
zerokyuu
FTA, those are the two things that don't seem to be improved.

"Application results were much more impressive. Because the drive learns, the
first time you bring up an app it happens at disk speed. But the 2nd time!"

"Boot performance sucked compared to the old drive’s ~45 second boot"

Boot performance was improved by doing a clean install, however, the best the
reviewer got was close to the old HDD speeds (45 seconds) not a Macbook Air's
boot times with SDD (15-20 seconds).

If you watch the videos, the speedups being boasted on the review involve
opening the application, closing it, and opening it again, without running
anything else.

~~~
pmjordan
Ah. Looks like it's a pretty clueless review then. (and Seagate need to work
on their algorithm) Sorry, hadn't read the whole thing when I posted.

------
jrockway
Seems pointless; the flash only works as a _read cache_. I already have a 4G
read cache that's much faster, it's called main memory.

SSDs are nice for lots of random reads/writes; I noticed the biggest
improvements on things like "apt-get upgrade"; deleting files, reading
tarballs, updating a database. This is where SSDs excel, but the SSD that's
part of this disk won't help with any of that. When you download the tarball,
it hits the magnetic disk. Then when you extract that, you read from the disk,
and write to the disk. Then you read the package database... all from disk.
You update the package database... yup, disk write. And so on; this drive will
do nothing to help this use case. Anything that could be cached will be
invalidated by a write. So you get no speedup on the only workload other than
booting that helps a regular user.

If you're thinking of buying this, buy a regular disk instead, and save the
$60 premium for a real SSD. Even Intel's "budget" 40G SSD will make your
computer noticeably faster... but this thing won't.

~~~
sorbus
Main memory doesn't persist across reboots; this does. Hence, potential
increase in boot speed for the main OS, as well as a decrease in start-up time
for an application the first time you run it after starting the OS.

And yep, no increase in that use case. Faster in the use case of opening
programs (as mentioned in the article), faster in the use case of opening
small files, and so forth.

Your last sentence is needless hyperbole, and is contradicted by the last
sentence in your middle paragraph. Not that I disagree with your conclusion,
though.

~~~
jacquesm
Rebooting is rare compared to regular use.

The box I'm writing this on has an uptime of 148 days, the last time it went
down was to put a second graphic card in it. I really don't see how a 'faster
boot' would be of any benefit, in fact any benefit in faster boot time would
have to be balanced with how long it took you to install that drive, format
it, install your OS and so on in the first time.

Use cases should center around that which happens frequently, optimizing boot
time for anything other than a netbook or a laptop that you don't 'sleep' is a
case of premature optimization.

For all the other use-cases you sketch main memory is _much_ more effective
than a cache in a device at the other end serial link.

~~~
chancho
Thanks for sharing your personal computing habits with us. I happen to reboot
quite often, switching between Ubuntu and Windows. I tried using a VM, but
there were too many issues. With an SSD, rebooting from one OS to the other is
fast enough to not be annoying, so I can have my dual-boot cake and eat it
too. I have paid, and will continue to pay good money for this.

~~~
jacquesm
You should try a real SSD then.

------
dedward
From the admittedly not very good benchmarks provided - I don't see the
appeal. I get the appeal of a potential hybrid - but I don't think this is it.

I replaced my system drive with an 80 gig Intel X25-M G2 a while ago
(late-2009 macbook pro) and performed a few other tweaks (which really may or
may not matter in the long run...)

My machine shuts down in less than 2 seconds and boots from power off to ready
to rock on the desktop in 20 seconds... and while before I used to say "well
who cares about boot time, I never reboot"..... I've now realized that I never
rebooted because rebooting was something to be avoided, because it took so
long. (not that it was long, but it was past that threshold where booting
became an event by itself you had to endure).

Now that I can have the thing booted about as fast as I can pour a cup of
coffee, and shut it down faster than it used to go into sleep mode (and sleep
mode is instant, plus you don't have to wait for spindown before yanking it
off the table and running to the next meeting anyway) I'll stick with my
solid-state goodness for my portable machine.

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tedunangst
Is it really so hard to just put your OS and apps on an SSD drive and keep
your big media files on a regular HDD? Unlike a disk, I can predict with 100%
accuracy what data seek times will matter for.

~~~
patio11
I bought a $2,000 laptop from Dell a few months ago with a 128 GB SSD and 500
GB Big Dumb Drive. Guess which one had Windows installed on it when it
arrived. _grumble grumble_ Scratch one day.

~~~
bkudria
They kept the SSD free for you to install Linux on? Nice!

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CapitalistCartr
This seems a bit like electric lights and horn on my horse-drawn buggy. Nice,
but making my buggy like an actual automobile is not the answer. I don't see
much of a future for these, even in large corporate applications. They can
simply mix HDDs with SSDs more efficiently.

~~~
eli
Of course a pure 500GB SSD would be better, but it's at least 10 times the
cost. Is it 10 times better than this drive? I really doubt it.

~~~
jessriedel
No, but I would guess this hybrid drive isn't 50% better than a regular old
500GB hard drive even though it's 150% the price. Value-wise, HDD > HDD-SSD >
SSD.

------
nonane
A more indepth and credible review is available at anandtech:
[http://www.anandtech.com/show/3734/seagates-momentus-xt-
revi...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/3734/seagates-momentus-xt-review-
finally-a-good-hybrid-hdd)

------
pasbesoin
What do people think of Seagate's reliability, these days? I've switched to
Western Digital for this reason, but the performance gains of these Seagate
models are tempting.

Of course, I'm a bit gun-shy about being an early adopter of a new product
line.

BTW, Amazon shows them available for pre-order. 500 GB is listed for US$138.

[http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-
alias%3Dap...](http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-
alias%3Daps&field-keywords=seagate+momentus+xt&x=0&y=0)

~~~
wazoox
I've setup about 3000 seagate drives in 2008 and 2009 (90% are 1TB Barracuda
ES2). In the second half of 2009, the quality dropped sharply. The number of
disk failures went through the ceiling (from about 1 to 3% per year to 5 to 8%
per year) and we switched to Hitachi.

I still don't have enough data to evaluate Hitachi drives reliability. Come
back next year :)

~~~
pasbesoin
Interesting. It is the "click of death" that is one of the more recent
incidents to cause me general concern with the brand.

[http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1050374/seagate-
bar...](http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1050374/seagate-
barracudas-7200-11-failing)

[http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/352816/seagate-hard-disks-
suffer...](http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/352816/seagate-hard-disks-suffer-from-
click-of-death)

------
old-gregg
_"Microsoft Word startup went from about 12 seconds to less than 3."_

What is it about OSX that makes applications to launch so slowly? Microsoft
Word _always_ starts in under 5 seconds on Windows, almost regardless of the
hardware, and has been for as long as I can remember. Sluggish application
launch was #1 impression after getting an MBP - nothing on it starts like
Notepad/Wordpad/Mspaint on Pentium III winbox circa 99.

My gut feeling is that it's dynamic linking. How wrong am I?

~~~
jdminhbg
Doesn't MS Office offload some of that load time to startup by running a
helper app on login that preloads some stuff? So your tradeoff is boot time vs
app launch time.

~~~
barrkel
I usually kill Office Start and all the other "fast startup" applications that
various bits and pieces install, but Word is damn fast to start. I've had
occasion to use Word 97 on modern machines - it starts about as fast as
Notepad.

~~~
icefox
What about Word 2007? Is that as fast as Notepad?

~~~
barrkel
I don't own Word 2007. I actually use OpenOffice for all office-like tasks;
they're somewhat slower, relatively glitchy, but they get the minimum amount
of work I need there done.

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cloudkj
So does the SSD portion effectively become a cache for the traditional platter
HDD portion? Seems similar to an L1 cache for a HDD. Of course, as the article
states, the caching algorithm will be application-specific. At 4GB however, it
wouldn't be hard at all to keep a significant portion of the OS and any oft-
used apps like browsers directly in the SSD portion.

~~~
pmjordan
That's the idea, but 4GB for a 500GB disk seems extremely small, especially
considering the price. The other problem I see with this is that the 4GB are
probably only one flash chip. Fast SSDs manage to sustain high transfer rates
by effectively arranging flash chips in a RAID-0; the 80/160GB Intel X25-M
SSDs use 10 chips in parallel if I remember correctly.

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kristianp
"By blurring the performance difference between disk and SSD, these drives
will ensure that hard drives dominate for at least another decade" - I would
say 18 months at the most. A decade is a long time in solid-state hardware!

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tocomment
Does anyone know where I can buy a nice desktop computer with an SSD drive? I
feel like I looked on Dell recently and didn't see any. (But then again I'm an
online shopping moran)

~~~
dedward
Buy the nice desktop computer and then install your own SSD and re-install the
system on it - then use the mechanical drive for bulk storage, compiling,
video streaming, etc.....

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silverlake
Is this similar to ReadyBoost in Windows? I haven't seen any benchmarks that
demonstrate significant performance. Why would it work better if the flash is
built into the hard drive?

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mberning
Would be nice to know when these will be available...

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xtho
7200 rpm: It seems they forgot about the noise.

