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A Hybrid hard drive gets a glowing recommendation

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mouser:
Looks like hybrid hard drives might start to become the next big thing:

Simply put a Hybrid HDD is a mechanical drive with some NAND flash on it that is automatically used by the drive to store data for quicker access. A hybrid drive really just attempts to do what my setup of two drives (SSD + HDD) does manually: put small, frequently used data on NAND flash and put larger, less frequently used data on platters.

In theory you get the best of both worlds, the overall capacity of a HDD and (most of the time) the performance of an SSD... Seagate's Momentus XT should become the standard hard drive in any notebook shipped... Compared standard 2.5" drives, the Momentus XT will set you back an additional $50 - 90 depending on the capacity point. The added cost is absolutely worth it.

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http://www.anandtech.com/show/3734/seagates-momentus-xt-review-finally-a-good-hybrid-hdd





from http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/

justice:
thanks for the link

f0dder:
I wonder how much sense this drive makes - 4GB is a very very very small cache for a 500gig drive. If the caching algorithm is very very very well done, it would be useful for caching OS and program files, and speeding up launches. Ideally, what you want cached is relatively small bursts of reads with non-linear LBAs... it the algorithm doesn't do something to avoid caching long linear reads, the cache will be evicted too easily, and you end up with poor performance.

The idea is interesting, but if it were to be really nice, there should be a way to say "hey, I really want this stuff pinned to flash" - either by über-fancy OS cooperation, or simply by the drive representing itself as two physical drives, one for SSD and one of HDD (wouldn't work well with Windows and a 4GB SSD, though).

Also, being read-only the benefit you get from it is going to be limited. There's still a lot of small-file scattered writes going on in today's systems.

Aha, Jeff Atwood has a post about it too... he uses the term "near-SSD performance", though, which you should take with a couple thousand grains of salt :)

Darwin:
Is this similar in concept to what the latest version of eBoostr does (and to a lesser degree ReadyBoost)?

f0dder:
Is this similar in concept to what the latest version of eBoostr does (and to a lesser degree ReadyBoost)?-Darwin (September 15, 2010, 11:29 AM)
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Kinda - ReadyBoost and eBoostr have the advantage (dunno if they're using it, though!) of being able to know "stuff about files", whereas putting the flash cache on the harddrive means the disk firmware can only look at sector addresses.

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