- Thursday, 26 November 2009
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All your Rambus are belong to us - David Icke's Lizard Wizard
Seagate laments flash no-go
STORAGE MAESTRO SEAGATE has revealed that it has gone back to the drawing board for its upcoming range of hybrid flash hard drives.
This week the company rolled out a new portable drive with a 5400RPM at 250GB capacity - but noticeably lacking any flash.
Flash technology was supposed to be an inflection point for mass storage, with drives getting faster and using less power thanks to the solid state caching technology. So far that hasn't happened, as hybrid drives have failed to deliver a performance boost as promised.
Indeed, many users have found that simply sticking a USB stick into a Vista computer to use the built-in Readyboost technology delivers a greater performance boost than a dedicated hard drive.
Flash has been a minor success in dedicated drives - the Macbook Air comes with 64GB flash drive as an option. But Joni Clark, a senior product marketing bod at Seagate, said, "What the lacklustre reviews told us, was that… customers want more performance out of hybrid drives."
Speaking at the launch, she said that the company has a new model in the works that should solve the problems. "That sucker is fast and will blow anything that's out there today out of the water," she rather confidently predicted. µ
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Blowing away everything that is currently out there, would only be exciting if it were a current product. If they release a product in 18 months that blows away everything thats 18 months old at that point, who will really care?

It reminds me of the companies that were claiming that they had a product in the works that would blow away the GeForce 256 or GeForce 2. By the time they got to market (if they ever did), it was too little too late.

Anyway, the hard drive market has been dull for too long, flash prices are falling fast, speeds are ramping up, and dying cache won't hose a system that's designed to work around the mess, so this could actually be big.
Personally, I think the companies see the direction the market is going and don't want to invest new money into these drives. On top of that, I think they're artificially keeping the performance of SSD's low (with the exception of the many-thousand dollar drives), in order to keep users tied to the tried-and-true mechanical drives. I think they make too much profit on the older tech and want to keep it that way, until the economy comes out of recession. Note: I'm talking US economy. Not overseas. I don't keep tabs on them.