Seagate Launches First Laptop Hybrid Hard Drive

[JacKz5o]

Seagate has finally started shipping its Momentus 5400 PSD 2.5-inch hybrid hard drive to OEMs. The drive will be available in 80, 120, and 160GB capacities with a SATA 1.5 interface, 8MB of cache, and 256MB of flash memory to buffer cached write requests to disk. Seagate's HHDs are said to reduce boot time from 40 to 32 seconds while cutting average power consumption from 0.78 to 0.45 watts. However, Melissa Johnson, a Seagate product manager, says the sub-par performance for all HHDs stems from first generation issues with both the BIOS and Vista device drivers because they do not know how to properly utilize the flash memory.



Source: ExtremeTech

[panchoman]

i can see the trouble with the flash memory not being utilized. but shouldn't take long for that to be fixed.

also... sata 1.5??? i've heard of sata 1/sata 150 and sata 2. but 1.5??

[ktr]

I want a desktop version of this!

[panchoman]

Originally Posted by ktr

I want a desktop version of this!

i think theres already plenty of samsung ones out there already for desktops.

[ktr]

Originally Posted by panchoman

i think theres already plenty of samsung ones out there already for desktops.

where?

[KennyT772]

Originally Posted by panchoman

i can see the trouble with the flash memory not being utilized. but shouldn't take long for that to be fixed.

also... sata 1.5??? i've heard of sata 1/sata 150 and sata 2. but 1.5??

1.5gigabit per second transfer rate or 150megabyte per second transferrate is common in laptops as they work with older chipsets along with new. Speed matters little in the ultra-light noteboot segment compared to power useage.

[WarEagleAU]

wonder how these would work replacing the PS3 60GB hdd with these...

[kwchang007]

Originally Posted by WarEagleAU

wonder how these would work replacing the PS3 60GB hdd with these...

Mmm good idea, load the game to the hdd then have fast loading times

[qwerty_lesh]

can u imagine how much better a portable video player or a mp3 player would be with these drives (if they become a standard for 2'5 & are optimised for the devices), or one of those ultra mobile mini pc's, or say a tablet notebook - this hdd design has alot of potential i wonder if they plan on developing the platter to spin at faster rates, so the end users can enjoy the full 1.5gbs transfer rates
i think this idea is great for NCQ disks aswell

[Mussels]

sata 1.5 = sata-I
Sata 3/300 = sata-II

Companies love messing with the name, say its a sata-II drive but missing a feature (NCQ) ooops we cant call it sata-II, so now its just a sata 300 drive.

[OnBoard]

Is that really smart? Beeing a flash buffer, it will get read/writes all the time. I don't see this drive lasting longer than a year, or at least it has very little of the orginal 256MB flash space usable. Those DDR based ones are more like it with 1gig of memory

[mdm-adph]

I think I'll wait for the full flash drives, thank you. :P

And don't these only work properly with Vista?

[Mussels]

Originally Posted by OnBoard

Is that really smart? Beeing a flash buffer, it will get read/writes all the time. I don't see this drive lasting longer than a year, or at least it has very little of the orginal 256MB flash space usable. Those DDR based ones are more like it with 1gig of memory

I beleive the idea was that writes go to the 256MB, and when its full it dumps it in one go.

For the average joe word processing on a laptop, that cuts out a lot of wear and tear on the motor, and its safer if he's typing on the go too, since the motor is inactive the drive is safer from shocks/bumps