I was at the Giants game with Seagate CEO Bill Watkins and had to ask him about my favorite future product: the hybrid hard disk. I wanted to know where it was and when it will get to the desktop. It’s apparently years away. Groan.
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John, did you at least buy the guy a beer and a dog for giving in to your cranky questioning?
I kinda suspect that that’s the answer you’d get from anyone fronting a company that’s as heavily vested in mechanical storage and as weak on purely electronic product.
I kinda equally suspect that you’d get a far more optimistic response from his counterpart at Hitachi, what with them having a foot in each camp, so to speak…
I would have asked him when Seagate is going to fix the damn drivers for the Maxstore USB one touch drives since they bought the company. This is a product that would rule if it worked, real time folder sync, like a mirror. But it bombs and actually blue screens. Oh well
Tomshardware have tested some hhd. But the flash memory was to small to make any significant performance boost.
Read:
http://tinyurl.com/2llc95
[Please use TinyUrl.com for overly long URLs. – ed.]
One of the best places I’ve found to see the current state of flash hard drives (in any form) is:
http://www.dvnation.com/nand-flash-ssd.html
OK, so they show a 128Gb 3.5″ SATA drive for $6k, but prices continually drop, so you can almost see them coming.
I’m thinking 128Gb is perfect for a windows system drive and applications. Then buy one of those spiffy new 2TB hard drives for your mega storage requirements.
Thanks for sharing this. For now, these things should go a long way for notebook weight and durability. Drive technology seems slow to progress though.
I can see letting 3.5″ HHD’s mature in a server environment first for a few reasons:
1: Servers get a major benefit from faster drives that desktops don’t show as much.
2: Server drives are already more expensive because as a standard they all run at 10,000RPM (something only WD has released for client systems, and the biggest drive is only 150GB).
3: Fail safety. The majority of server drives are in RAID 5 hot swap RAID boxes that techs can simply pull a bad drive from without shutdown, replace it, and the array will rebuild the new drive. Not exactly an option in the average single-drive desktop.
HHD are not about speed. Cripes. How can everyone mix that information. I guess the fault is from the Windows Vista promotion marketing.
The flash memory inside the HD is slower (several times…) than the HD. Recording! – Reading is fast and seeking is negligible. The theory is that people can hold on that memory frequently accessed data without the need to spin-up the drive. Thus it’s best fitted on a portable. With enough memory, on powering up the laptop would boot straight from flas without spinning – up. Vista also has algorithm to cache frequent data. Say that the first thing you do after booting is to fire up Office. Vista would have already done it for you and straight from flash, again, without spinning up HD. That’s a tremendous battery saver.
Do I get a free bowl of soup for calling this non-revolution?
Forward thinking…bah. Why can’t a CD Rom drive have a couple of memory sims in them to read the CD and once read spin down? Heck EDO memory has got to go for $5 bucks a sim now, buy four 256’ers.
As to the hard drive industry, the goal has been bigger drives, not more efficient or speedier. They could have added memory management as per my suggestion years ago……
#11, There are some CD copy protection schemes that would not work with the solution that you are proposing.