Seagate to announce first hybrid drives for notebooks and 1TB desktop drive

[Bastieeeh]

Seagate held a special meeting yesterday where they presented at least two different soon to be introduced products. First there was a notebook hybrid hard drive that employs a 256MB flash memory buffer to cache data during normal use. The data come from a conventional 160GB 2.5 inch platter setup spinning at 5400rpm. Seagate officials said it won't digg into SSD (Solid State Disk) technology because the drives would be too expensive compared to present technology. When the buffer stored all the data the whole system needs in order to run the platters will come to rest and will spin up only when additional data is needed. The use of hybrid drives obviously offers great benefits, among them low access times, decreased power consumption and improved reliability.
The chaps from Chilehardware who attended the show also got more information regarding Seagate's 1TB (1 terabyte equals 1000GB) hard disk solution. By the end of April the 7200.11 Series will be in stores. All models out of this series feature a speed of 7200rpm, SATA II with NCQ (Native Command Qeueing) and 16MB cache. Thanks to the use of Seagate's advanced perpendicular recording efforts the aforementioned 1TB top model only needs 4 platters to store that amount of data. Hitachi's Deskstar 7K1000 1000GB however needs 5 platters which in general needs a stronger motor and bearings which is in turn more expensive to produce.

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[WarEagleAU]

Awesome. Flash memory should be able to hold enough memory for current needs, only accessing during perhaps, benchmarks, tests (antivirus, updates, etc) and gaming. I like this idea and I hope they employ it in their 1TB HDD Desktop drive. 5400rpm is still slow though, and they need to move it to the 7200 rpm speed. We have been stuck on that rpm for quite some time ( a few years) and I Think its time they advanced. I like the power saving feature of the hybrid drive and also, how it prolongs the drives life! Less access to the platters and spinning, mean less wear and tear on the drive itself. Good call.


Nice work with the 1TB drive as well. I havent tried Perpindicular technology, but if they can get 4 platters with like 225GB a piece on there, Im sure they could probably get 3 platters with 333.334 gb of info on there. Im hoping to see more advances on the perpindicular front myself.

 

[AsphyxiA]

imagine these in a RAID 0 config... OMG so fast and tons of space!