When they were introduced a couple of years ago, hybrid hard drives seemed enticing. Pairing a standard hard drive with a flash component sounded like a good way to deliver on the theoretical performance boosts that flash can offer while still providing the long-standing price, capacity, and performance benefits of hard disks. We've now tested the first two hybrid hard drives to reach market, and we've discovered some clear benefits--but other results were inconclusive.
We looked at Seagate's Momentus 5400 PSD drive, announced today, and Samsung's SpinPoint MH80 drive, released this summer. Both models are 2.5-inch, 160GB notebook drives with 256MB of nonvolatile flash memory cache on board. The hard-drive industry concentrated on introducing the new technology in laptop drives because notebooks would be more likely to reap the benefits that hybrid tech promises, including faster boot time and power savings.
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News source: PCWorld
We looked at Seagate's Momentus 5400 PSD drive, announced today, and Samsung's SpinPoint MH80 drive, released this summer. Both models are 2.5-inch, 160GB notebook drives with 256MB of nonvolatile flash memory cache on board. The hard-drive industry concentrated on introducing the new technology in laptop drives because notebooks would be more likely to reap the benefits that hybrid tech promises, including faster boot time and power savings.
View: The full story News source: PCWorld
This should have been released in the first quarter of 2007, and also mentioned in the Windows Vista website.
The other thing to consider is at what point does adding more flash not produce any more speed improvement. As I understand, the two ways speed is improved is with better pre-caching, and by storing boot-time files in flash. Boot files are notoriously small, and there's only so much you can pre-cache before the benefit is lost.
So, it's about finding the right balance point, not throwing as much memory in there as possible.
We'll need much larger capacity SSD drives for decent prices before that ever happens.. I almost ran out of room with all my apps and games on a 160GB (now I have 3 160GB in RAID 0 lol).
Hybrid might be better since transfer rates are actually slower on SSD, just the seek time is almost non existant.
We'll need much larger capacity SSD drives for decent prices before that ever happens.. I almost ran out of room with all my apps and games on a 160GB (now I have 3 160GB in RAID 0 lol).
Hybrid might be better since transfer rates are actually slower on SSD, just the seek time is almost non existant.
Are you serious? I run on a 40 Gig hard drive with plenty of space to spare. I think that the idea of using a seperate device to store the OS is great. I think that even the latest version of Windows could fit on a 4GB flash chip (is this SSD?) without any problems.
We'll need much larger capacity SSD drives for decent prices before that ever happens.. I almost ran out of room with all my apps and games on a 160GB (now I have 3 160GB in RAID 0 lol).
Hybrid might be better since transfer rates are actually slower on SSD, just the seek time is almost non existant.
Are you serious? I run on a 40 Gig hard drive with plenty of space to spare. I think that the idea of using a seperate device to store the OS is great. I think that even the latest version of Windows could fit on a 4GB flash chip (is this SSD?) without any problems.
latest? no way in heck... Vista in 64bit takes 15GB of hard drive space up... because of SxS and all the other requirements... the 74GB SSD drives are all you need right now and for a while... install your apps on another drive...
on the newest SSD's too the transfer rates approach 160MB/ps something a single HD can not sustain at all...
2) spartyjohnson - Vista sapped 10gb from my drive straight away. Go figure. SSD for OS is a good idea though, it'd be interesting to see the performance stats for that kind of setup.
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