Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac - Henry Kissinger
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Hybrid hard drives finally ship
SEAGATE HAS FINALLY started shipping hybrid hard disk drives, but enthusiasts hoping to see a big performance kick should be warned - they won't get it.
It's taken an age to move the concept of thumb-drive-on-a-hard-drive past the point of good idea through to good product. After all, we were hearing about these drives well before Vista wiggled its way onto our desktops.
In fact, Vista was the whole point - by including up to 1GB of flash memory on a hard drive, Vista could use the drive for ReadyBoost functions and cache itself like crazy, improving performance and battery life. The concept was designed to mix the best of solid state drives - fast access, lower power - with magnetic drives - big capacities, cheap prices.
The new Momentus models are laptop drives at 2.5", and come in capacities of 80, 120 and 160GB with 256MB of flash. The extra 256MB on-board will mean a price premium of around 25%, Seagate has said.
But the performance will likely not be there to justify it. Seagate claims the average boot time is cut from 40 to 32 seconds, whilst the average power consumption will be cut from 0.78W to 0.45W. But that's pretty much all the improvement you're going to see - early Vista drivers and a lack of BIOS support mean that everyday use is not going to be speeded up.
Seagate claims that its second-gen technology will solve this problem and deliver some hardcore performance boosts to satisfy power-hounds. But if that's the case, there doesn't seem much reason to get excited about the current round. µ
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Quote from Peter: "If XP is really going away why is microsoft still releasing xp sp3 ?"

The same reason service packs for NT4 continued to be released even after W2K's release. The same reason service packs for W2K continued to be released even after XP's release. There is nothing different this time. Would Microsoft like everyone on the planet to suddenly switch to Vista? Hell yes. But that's not gonna happen. Over time almost everyone will have it and the last stragglers will only get to updating to it when MS's next OS comes out. Absorption rate is slow and steady. People are reluctant to upgrade when they feel they have everything they need already.
Why should 256MB of flash and some extra circuitry increase the price of various sized hard drives by 25%? Shouldn't the cost of the extra bits and pieces have some dollar value instead? Say, maybe a $15 premium or something -- why should the feature cost more on a larger hard drive?
I'll never buy it. I'll never install it on a customer's machine either.
The article is consistent. Mentioning XP would be applicable if the article were talking about the drive cache, but this is flash memory which needs OS support to take advantage of it.

WinXP isn't mentioned because XP doesn't have Readyboost and can't take advantage of the Flash. The drive itself won't know what data to keep in flash, so you need an OS that is aware. The article even mentions that Vista's own support isn't mature either.
I've been using dual boot for about 6-12 months now, and have read that SSD/flash drives etc offer little or no performance when vista is paired with 2GB or more HDD space.

In fact I have switched a number of services off just to be able to force vista to utilize more than 1.2GB of memory, as it seems to get confused with readyboost and "other" related services turned on and start caching at this point - despite having an extra 800MB available.

For the first time after disabling three services I saw vista actually use 1.8GB of ram, so unless they issue a patch for these (which they may well have announced if they have don't flame me) I can't see how the 25% premium is going to benefit a user who can now may £50 for 2GIG.
Obvious : in order to break the performance of XP so badly that everyone will gladly go to the lower-performing, DRM-infested Vista.
Well, that's what Ballmer thinks, anyway.
This is to clear up the misperceptions recently appearing in the press and blogosphere that hybrid hard drives are somehow not delivering as promised. 

Hybrid hard drives, including Seagate's Momentus 5400 PSD, provide all the benefits that the technology originally promised: faster boot up, higher reliability and reduced power consumption. In particular, Seagate has seen a 50% cut in power draw and 20% faster boot time. Hybrid technology has also boosted hard drive reliability, doubling a traditional laptop drive’s MTBF – a measure of its reliability – from 300,000 hours to 600,000 hours and increasing its shock resistance in hybrid mode to 900 Gs, the rough equivalent of dropping a laptop from a height of six feet to a hard surface.

An independent review of the Sony Vaio SZ650, which now sports Seagate’s Momentus 5400 PSD hybrid hard drive, also helps cut through the misperception that hybrid technology isn’t ready for prime time. The evaluation found that the hybrid drive delivers “incredibly fast access times” and that “the machine does boot quickly and resume from hibernation quickly as well.” Momentus 5400 PSD, the review found, increased battery life by 25%, tantamount to adding 45 minutes to the low end of Vaio’s 3-6 hour run time specified by Sony. 

In the near term, three other major computer makers plan to offer laptops featuring Momentus 5400 PSD. These original computer manufacturers make significant investments in qualifying and integrating hard drives and wouldn’t be gearing up to ship units with hybrid technology if they didn’t believe it delivers compelling value to their customers.

As with any new technology, refinements will be made to hybrid technology to deliver incremental improvements to the end user over time. Hard drives, third-party software device drivers, BIOS products and other laptop components will be further tuned to deliver these enhancements.


C'mon guys, please be a bit more consistent. 

Only an hour ago, you published an article ("Vista uptake is barely more than Windows 98 share") claiming that Vista has only 0.32% market share in the business sector. Now, in this item, you tell us what hybrid drives will do for Vista performance. Given that only businesses could afford hybrid drives right now, what's your target audience?

Since, according to your own article, nearly 83% of businesses are still using WinXP, wouldn't it be more useful to tell us how XP's performance would be affected, and make the Vista comments a laconic footnote?
Addressing Jon's comment: What exactly does Vista market share have to do with any performance Vista would gain with hybrid drives? Two different articles, one not related to the other with the exception of Vista. No reason for these two pieces to be "consistent" with each other, especially since they have nothing to do with each other.

You'll be changing to Vista eventually though. Just as you changed to XP. Only a matter of time.
It's probably meant heavily for laptops, which could do with the lower power consumption. These will mostly come with Vista.
"average power consumption will be cut from 0.78W to 0.45W" oh ho. That is a lot. should make lapies much nor lap friedly, save some battery time.
I just wonder Seagate uses so little flash. I would pay the 50$ for 1Gb...
Cheers
M,
I believe the penetration level for vista is not there yet. It's utilizing too much resource and from what i understand. Alot of users had downgrade from vista back to XP and even microsoft has added a feature to allow some version of vista to downgrade directly. If XP is really going away why is microsoft still releasing xp sp3 ?
Jon, as Windows XP doesn't support ReadyBoost (last I checked), the impact of these drives on Windows XP existing clients is... none.

Nice comment otherwise, though.

Cheers!
-> Scott.
Cross Posting on same narrow subject of Vista seems OK enough, in fact TOP Machines have NO o/s, it'd Play VistaUltimate, yet as software additions added up, maybe warrentee problems near 100%, not fault of anyone in channel, there just isn't completely acceptable chipset, at this time

Point is that Business demands Retail quality in rental or service Contract & Machines are bit Thin. Therefore, zilcth sales until that promised chipset-expert could tell you going from XP NT5 to Vista NT5 is not? worth anywhere near cost of all new computers.

Bit Locker is great, Faster you Boot up, Longer that Partitions Death may be delayed, as it can Slow Down with age, yet still be useable. Also there are no glitches or errors in Boot Up with Ready Boost, No Hangs, No Crashes. No Tortured Assemblages.

If your Vista Unit Dosn't Have Ready Boost/ Bit Locker installed on USB Flash & Turned On in your Security Control Panel-"You Da' FOOL Children" Mr.T.

haha
Signed:PHYSICIAN THOMAS STEWART VON DRASHEK M.D.

"What exactly does Vista market share have to do with any performance Vista would gain with hybrid drives?"

It's about addressing your readership. If almost no-one in business is buying Vista, and everyone's sticking with XP, then the article's focus should be with how a hybrid drive would perform with what its customers are using right now. By the time Vista has a toe-hold in business, the review will be very old news.

As for the /ad hominem/ stuff, I'm going to wait out the alpha-testing period, and avoid getting anything with Vista until it offers me tangible benefits. Neither of my businesses has a single Vista licence, and I don't anticipate approving Vista purchases for the foreseeable.

So far, MS's unique sales proposition for Vista appears to be "We know it'll break half your software and won't run on half your hardware, meaning lots of new purchases, and it'll cause massive support hassles during and after the transition, but buy it anyway because ... um ... well, we'll make XP obsolete ... just as soon as people start buying Vista."
I'm still running Linux (10 years now). I most certainly won't be migrating to Vista. I still haven't migrated to XP. My latest Microsoft OS is Windows 2000, which I used to use for DVD's and Diablo II. It's still around, though mostly through VMware. I still need it to configure my Compaq RAID controller, and to occasionally get into a VPN for work. I'm looking to upgrade my RAID controller and set up the VPN under Linux, so I can finally disinfect my computer.

After having to develop windows software, I'm quite surprised that Microsoft is still able to find people who will buy their junk. Almost nothing is to standard, and the WinAPI makes a mockery of good C++. I'm just thankful for cygwin, sshd, boost.org, and that I've only had to write one or two libraries to interface with the WinAPI. I am planning a party once the company starts dying and stops ruining my computing experience.

Now that OpenOffice has finally assigned someone to program the feature to let tab stops snap to ruler marks, I say good riddance to Microsoft!

In order to keep this more on topic, what were they thinking with only 256MB cache? At Newegg, flash memory is about $10/GB, and it has to be cheaper if you're just buying chips to attach to a board you already have. 2 GB provides quite a bit of cache for a Linux system (not sure about Windows). A bigger cache means you would be able to leave more items permanently loaded in there, making it faster, giving it longer battery life and it would take longer to wear out the flash memory. 

With the extra performance and lifespan, I'm sure customers would feel less silly paying a 30% markup for the better product. I'm sure seagate would enjoy the extra money, unless they're hoping to screw customers into buying a good product now and then upgrading to what they should have gotten in the first place.