Toshiba Outs New Hybrid Hard Drives

[btarunr]

Toshiba announced the new MQ01ABD series hybrid hard drives for notebooks. Built in the 2.5-inch 9.5 mm-thick form-factor, the drives embed a dual-platter hard drive with 8 GB of SLC NAND flash memory, and 32 MB cache for the hard drive component. The hard drive component has a maximum spindle speed of 5,400 RPM. Available in 750 GB (MQ01ABD075H) and 1 TB (MQ01ABD100H) variants, the drives support SATA 6 Gb/s interface, and Advanced Format. The company did not reveal pricing, as the two drives are being sampled from today.



Source: Hermitage Akihabara

[RejZoR]

I don't get it why no one bothers to make hybrid 3,5 inch drives? Some ppl want speed and capacity for desktops as well...

[UbErN00b]

I don't think it right that Toshiba outed these drives, I think it's a very personal thing and they should be able to come out when they feel they are ready...

Wonder if these will bring down the prices of the Seagate Momentus hybrid drives? Anyone here use a hybrid? how do they actually compare to a standard HDD?

[BazookaJoe]

Originally Posted by UbErN00b

I don't think it right that Toshiba outed these drives, I think it's a very personal thing and they should be able to come out when they feel they are ready...

Wonder if these will bring down the prices of the Seagate Momentus hybrid drives? Anyone here use a hybrid? how do they actually compare to a standard HDD?

So far the verdict is that they ARE better than standard drives with regards to many and repeated reads & writes, for example repeatedly opening and closing programs like Photoshop / Office / Or playing games with different level areas that you constantly travel back and forwards between, BUT in many cases, not significantly better.

Overall things do run smoother - and the drive thrashes less than a standard drive so in theory the mechanical components would actually last longer, assuming the "hybrid" ssd like components can last as long , which is unlikely as unlike an ssd where the load is evenly distributed over the entire memory - in a hybrid drive that little 8GB cache is under virtually 100% load almost all the time whilst using the drive.

So... if you would like your laptop running a bit smoother, but not too much, and you NEED larger storage volumes overall - they are nice - but in the long run if you really want performance, just man up and buy a real SSD. Its not like there's really such a huge price difference - relative to the cost of a high end Laptop that could actually use the performance to begin with, the price of a Good SSD really isn't that much at all, and if your laptop is a cheapo, well the performance increase really is wasted anyway.

Some say hybrids do work nicely in raid arrays, that have a large amount of "long term storage" data - and only a small amount of "working set" data - but I cant say much on that.