Hybrid drives are back – Seagate launches the Momentus XT Written on May 25, 2010, by Scott.
Here is a very interesting development. Seagate is launching the new hybrid solid state Momentus XT drive. The 1st generation of Seagate hybrid drives which were launched in June 2006 but never gain any commercial success. The drives relied on Microsoft Vista’s Ready Boost technology for their read caching algorythm which excluded their use in anything but Vista based PCs. This time around Seagate has developed a self contained solution so it’s benefits can be utilized with any operating system.
The new Momentus XT line tries to walk the fine line between the performance benefits of a Solid State Drive and the cost of a regular hard disk. The hybrid drives support capacities from 250 to 500GB in a 2.5″ formfactor with a SATA II (3Gbps) interface and 7200 rpm. The solid state cache consists a fairly large 32MB DRAM cache and a some what small single 4GB SLC NAND chip. The use of SLC NAND could pay off in faster performance and longer endurance, but with a NAND to HDD cache ratio as high as 1:125 it remain to be see how effective this cache and Seagates caching algorythms will work in real life. Another gripe is the fact that the NAND cache is only used as a read cache, so writes are will always happen at magnetic media speeds and it is unclear how well the cache updates can be hidden in the background. Being such a new product we won’t know if it will be plagued by similar birthing pains as with SSD’s like slowdowns if not TRIMed or long latency writes when the cache is updated. Finally power consumption is still significantly higher than a SSD. Seagate’s marketing states a 80% better performance than a comparable 7200rpm drive, but the more interesting comparison to an SSD is missing. The pricing structure looks much more positive, the Momentus XT drives carry an MSRP of $113 for the 250 GB device, $132 for the 320 GB version, and $156 for the 500 GB one. A quick check on Newegg shows non-hybrid 7200 drives selling for $85 which is almost a 50% premium. Given the additional components I’m guessing Seagate has some flexibility here.
Seagate’s new hybrid drives definitely will find its supporters in a portion of the portable computing segment where larger drive capacities are a must and where the price/capacity trade-offs of a $80-100 40GB entry level SSD or a $150 64GB mid range solution just won’t meet their needs. If Seagate can get the premium compared to a 7200rpm close to zero then there would be no need to buy non-hybrid drives at all, this might happen anyway just to remain competitive if SSDs start displacing HDDs at the consumer level.
Personally I’m looking forward to Intel’s introduction of their next generation SSDs using 25nm NAND. Intel recently announced that they were on track and sampling parts to customers. If this new technology has a similar impact as when they introduced their 34nm parts we might see a 60% reduction of SSD ASPs. This would put fast 80GB SSDs in the sub $100 range. Then I think we are looking at a scenario similar as with the iPod Touch vs Classic, most people can fit their music collection in less than 32GB storage, only folks who use a lot of video still opt for the larger capacity classic. 80GB is sufficient for most business applications today (128GB will be the killer) and the performance/power consumption/reliability/portability benefits of an SSD will outway getting a rotating disk.
In closing the technology looks much more promising now that the Vista requirement has been removed. If Seagate can reduce the premium to close to parity with similar hard drives then the story becomes much more compelling. Otherwise consumers will need to wait for real world and third party benchmarks to see how well the small 4GB cache and Seagate’s read caching algorythms will work.
Links:
- Seagate press release
- Momentus XT product page (Online Launch event on 5/26/2010)
- Anandtech review: Seagate’s Momentus XT Reviewed, Finally a Good Hybrid HDD
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