Hybrid drives?

[BuzzKillington]

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-Details.asp?EdpNo=6280178&sku=TMD-500AS4&srkey=Solid%20State%20Hybrid%20Drive

cheaper at the egg http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148591

[x88x]

Nice! They finally came out! Not the biggest flash portion, but hey, it's first gen, it'll get better...right?

(Is your question about their existence/purpose/what?)

[BuzzKillington]

Their existence! I've never heard of them but in their benchmark comparison it owned the 10k drive and embarrassed the 7200k.

I'm wondering if running a single drive would show any results over 2x7200 in R0? Maybe if I get the money, I can just stripe 2xhybrids? I wonder how they'd perform compared to a single SSD?

[Zephik]

Awesome! This is a great "in between" drive until Solid State Drives drop down in price a bit more. That and it's high capacity. Solid States have high capacity too, but the price to gigabyte ratio is extraordinary.

So these new drives are affordable, high capacity and faster than a cheetah IN KENYA!

What's not to love? It's even the right size so it can be used in either laptops or desktops.

I'll definitely be putting one of these into my laptop revival project.

Edit: What's with all the Mac comments? Is this Macbook drive or something?

[x88x]

Their existence! I've never heard of them but in their benchmark comparison it owned the 10k drive and embarrassed the 7200k.

Ah, ok. Basically, it's a cross between a platter HDD and an SSD. It has three levels of read media: the 32MB disk cache, the 4GB of SLC NAND, and the 500GB platter(s). The cache is the fastest, followed by the NAND, and finally the platter(s). Think of it kinda like the CPU register, CPU cache, and RAM in a computer; the data that is needed right now is put in the cache, data that is anticipated to be needed soon is put in the NAND, and everything is stored on the platters. Basically, the NAND is an extension of the cache, just not quite as fast, but a lot cheaper.

Apparently in future models with much larger NAND portions, they're planning on letting the consumer choose to address the NAND as a separate drive, with a separate controller, so you could basically have an SSD and a platter HDD in one.

I'm not sure about RAID-ing these; I would imagine that the controller would have to know how to deal with hybrid drives in order for you to get much in the way of a performance increase.

I think if WD wants the Velociraptor line to live they're gonna need to take this route...though idk, they may have given up on it now that they're making SSDs...

[nevermind1534]

One of the big things about vista was that it would support laptop hybrid drives. I think they came a little later than Microsoft expected, unless that was a marketing ploy that they know would never have any practical use during Vista's lifetime.

[x88x]

I think it may have been largely just a matter of NAND production ramping up enough so that it was actually feasible to do something like this, get the performance increase needed, and still keep it within a reasonable price envelope.

[crenn]

I'm not sure about RAID-ing these; I would imagine that the controller would have to know how to deal with hybrid drives in order for you to get much in the way of a performance increase.
Well the beauty of this drive is, the hybrid part is handled by the firmware itself. The OS and RAID controller only needs to support a normal drive for it to work.

I'm looking at getting a couple of these drives.

EDIT: Also if the flash part fails, it just becomes a normal HDD!

[x88x]

But would you get the same performance boost if the RAID controller doesn't know how to handle it properly? I'm guessing not (I could be wrong though). It'd still be faster than a standard HDD RAID in any case. :D

[crenn]

But would you get the same performance boost if the RAID controller doesn't know how to handle it properly? I'm guessing not (I could be wrong though). It'd still be faster than a standard HDD RAID in any case. :D
What's there to handle? It appears as a normal HDD.

[x88x]

Properly managing the NAND caches with the striping. I'm assuming that the NAND caches can be centrally managed. Even with normal HDDs, if you synchronize the stripe size with the cache size of the drives you can get a sizable performance boost. I would think that properly managed you would get even more out of the NAND caches on these. ...come to think of it, I can't wait to see the 15k RPM SAS hybrid drives that I'm sure will inevitably come out. :twisted:

[crenn]

Properly managing the NAND caches with the striping. I'm assuming that the NAND caches can be centrally managed. Even with normal HDDs, if you synchronize the stripe size with the cache size of the drives you can get a sizable performance boost. I would think that properly managed you would get even more out of the NAND caches on these. ...come to think of it, I can't wait to see the 15k RPM SAS hybrid drives that I'm sure will inevitably come out. :twisted:
The NAND cache only stores what is used frequently on the HDD. So there is still nothing to manage on the controller side ;P. But if you do RAID 0 with 2 of these drives, you'll get effectivally a 8GB NAND cache due to how the computer works!

[Zephik]

Someone needs to test this asap! I wonder if we can get two for review?

[Trace]

Send em my way. I'll bench them on my 980x

[BuzzKillington]

Looks like quite a few reviews have popped up on tiger and the egg and seagate has yet another failing item. What happened to seagate? They used to be good drives now they're known for failing. Sad.

[Zephik]

Looks like quite a few reviews have popped up on tiger and the egg and seagate has yet another failing item. What happened to seagate? They used to be good drives now they're known for failing. Sad.

I believe they acquired Maxtor? Pretty much poisoned them from within.

[x88x]

I believe they acquired Maxtor? Pretty much poisoned them from within.

Agreed. Their enterprise drives are still stellar, but it seems like after they bought Maxtor, the overall quality went down. ..though it might just be that so many of us were shocked by the 7200.11 firmware problems and have a really hard time trusting them again...tbh I think that might be it more than anything. Also, they dropped all their warranties from 5 years to 3. :(

[crenn]

Looks like quite a few reviews have popped up on tiger and the egg and seagate has yet another failing item. What happened to seagate? They used to be good drives now they're known for failing. Sad.
Did you read the reviews?
2 of the tiger direct ones are complaining the fact they haven't gotten their drives. One is about a MBP and frankly is quite confusing because of his final line. As for the reviews on newegg, one 'one egg' review, and a few '2 egg' reviews. To be honest, if it was such a bad item, wouldn't there be a lot more?

The thing I find with reviews most is the fact that a lot of people who are happy with their device, don't review while people unhappy with it, do. This is a fairly new entry and to be honest, I'm not seeing 'another failing item' from seagate compared with other drives. As with all devices, not every device is the exact same, there could be a small batch of devices which are faulty, there is that chance with any product made. Ultimately what I'm saying is, unless there is a huge number of people saying this drive is crap, then it probably isn't bad or some people just had bad experiences, or felt it should have performed more like an SSD all the time.


Agreed. Their enterprise drives are still stellar, but it seems like after they bought Maxtor, the overall quality went down. ..though it might just be that so many of us were shocked by the 7200.11 firmware problems and have a really hard time trusting them again...tbh I think that might be it more than anything. Also, they dropped all their warranties from 5 years to 3. :(

I had 4 1TB 7200.11 drives. All of them worked flawlessly until I sold them 2 years later (2 to a friend, 2 to my father), and they're still working well. Truthfully I've had 1 fail but not due to firmware and I had no problems RMAing or getting the data off before the drive completely failed. I also had 2 1TB 7200.12 drives, all worked lovely until I sold one of them and the other failed (SMART told me one was going to fail soon). Yet to RMA that other one, but I replaced those 6 1TB drives with 3 2TB Seagate LP drives, and all of them are working well ;P

[x88x]

I had 4 1TB 7200.11 drives. All of them worked flawlessly until I sold them 2 years later (2 to a friend, 2 to my father), and they're still working well. Truthfully I've had 1 fail but not due to firmware and I had no problems RMAing or getting the data off before the drive completely failed. I also had 2 1TB 7200.12 drives, all worked lovely until I sold one of them and the other failed (SMART told me one was going to fail soon). Yet to RMA that other one, but I replaced those 6 1TB drives with 3 2TB Seagate LP drives, and all of them are working well ;P

Good to know. I used to be a diehard Seagate guy, but after reading all the crap that happened with a lot of the 7200.11 drives, I really lost faith in them...I haven't heard anything bad about the 7200.12's though, so hopefully they're back on track. :D

[crenn]

Good to know. I used to be a diehard Seagate guy, but after reading all the crap that happened with a lot of the 7200.11 drives, I really lost faith in them...I haven't heard anything bad about the 7200.12's though, so hopefully they're back on track. :D
Well WD makes good HDDs, I only go for Seagate because they're a good company in my opinion, but that can change.