[nfbmi-talk] Fw: [Accessible Devices] Hybrid Hard Drives Finally Come of Age

[gkitchen]

Hi,

These sound like they are  finally worth perhaps looking into?

Georgia
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Accessible Devices" <parker2745 at accessible-devices.com>
To: "Accessible Devices List" <A-d at accessible-devices.com>
Sent: Thursday, October 21, 2010 1:22 PM
Subject: [Accessible Devices] Hybrid Hard Drives Finally Come of Age


> We believe many of you will find this information useful.
> This is all the information we have on this.
> Hybrid hard drives finally come of age
> Becky Waring
> By Becky Waring
> Once hailed as the perfect compromise between pricey solid-state drives 
> and cheaper-but-slower
> platter models, hybrid hard drives quickly became a technological flash in 
> the pan.
> But new models from Seagate have resuscitated the technology — the 
> Momentus XT line
> offers many of solid state's benefits without the sticker shock.
> The theory behind hybrid hard drives was intriguing, and back in 2007 the 
> technology
> made quite a splash. Marrying a small amount of nonvolatile flash memory 
> to standard
> hard disks would greatly improve overall drive performance — especially 
> system boot
> and application startup times. And hybrid drive technology would cost a 
> fraction
> of full solid-state drives (SSDs).
> Unfortunately, those early drives relied on special Windows OS support 
> (anyone remember
> Windows Vista ReadyDrive?) to determine what data should be stored in 
> flash. You
> also needed custom drivers for every hybrid-drive model. As described in a 
> 2007 ZDNet
> story
> , "Hybrid drives: not so fast!," the reality was underwhelming 
> performance. To make
> matters worse, the drives had reliability issues, and you could not use 
> standard
> disk-maintenance tools.
> In a 2009 ExtremeTech
> interview
> , a Seagate executive even predicted that hybrid hard drives would never 
> return.
> The article went on to state that Microsoft had no interest in 
> hybrid-drive technology
> and had no plans to support it in Windows 7. It was a marketing and 
> consumer nightmare,
> with Microsoft and drive manufacturers pointing fingers at each other. So, 
> an interesting
> technological advance suddenly seemed like an evolutionary dead end.
> Surprisingly, Seagate didn't give up on the concept. This summer it 
> shipped the first
> OS-independent hybrid drives. Neatly bypassing the problems of the first 
> generation,
> these new drives require no
> special drivers. They can be installed in place of any ordinary, 2.5-inch 
> SATA drive.
> Hybrids offer more bang for the buck than SSD
> Seagate's Momentus XT (
> info page
> ) is designed to fit in notebooks, and that's where hybrids offer the most 
> value.
> For the hybrids' small bump in price, you get near-desktop drive 
> performance. Many
> benchmarks — such as Storagereview.com's May 24
> review
> — put the XTs ahead of the 10,000 rpm Western Digital VelociRaptor, an 
> enterprise-class
> drive. (
> Near-desktop performance is why hybrids are better suited for notebooks.)
> The Momentus XT line's street price ranges from around U.S. $95 for 250GB 
> to $130
> for 500GB. Each of the three models (there's also a 320GB version) has 4GB 
> of flash
> memory, standard 7200 rpm platters, and 32MB of cache.
> That's about double what you might pay for the same-sized non-hybrid 
> notebook drive,
> but it's still quite modest compared to SSD prices. A hundred dollars will 
> buy you
> only a 40GB SSD drive, and you'll pay $400 for a 256GB model. Want a 500GB 
> SSD in
> your laptop? Be prepared to shell out $1,500 and up.
> Seagate also warranties the Momentus drives for five years — far better 
> than the
> three years on most SSDs.
> So how did Seagate finally make hybrids work? The company developed a 
> technology
> it calls Adaptive Memory,
> which puts frequently accessed data on the faster, nonvolatile, 
> solid-state memory.
> And when you restart your computer, data is still in solid-state memory, 
> giving OS
> and application startup times that fall about halfway between regular and 
> SSD boot
> times.
> You won't
> get a sustained performance increase while playing large videos or when 
> working
> with huge data files that can't squeeze into the 4GB of flash memory. But 
> system
> boots, application start times, and other common tasks should be 
> noticeably faster
> (and a 7200 rpm hard drive is no slouch to begin with).
> Power consumption is always an important consideration with notebooks. In 
> most tests,
> such as those in AnandTech.com's May 24
> review
> , the difference between hybrid and traditional platter drives was a wash. 
> Any power
> savings a hybrid drive might get from fewer platter-based read/writes was 
> consumed
> by the flash memory. So overall, there's little or no impact on notebook 
> heat or
> battery life.
> Whether a hybrid is a worthwhile upgrade depends on what drive is 
> currently residing
> in your notebook. If you have a 5400 rpm drive, the Momentus XT will 
> scream in comparison.
> If you already have a 7200 rpm drive, the boost will be much more modest. 
> That said,
> if you need more capacity and were going to buy a new drive anyway, by all 
> means
> get the XT.
> Use a drive dock for easy cloning and upgrading
> The easiest way to upgrade your notebook drive is to attach the new drive 
> externally,
> clone the internal drive using one of any number of disk-copy utilities, 
> then swap
> the drives. Seagate provides a free cloning tool, the Seagate DiscWizard (
> download page
> ), which is based on Acronis' True Image technology.
> But how do you attach the bare drive to your computer?
> You can buy a disk enclosure and put the new drive in it temporarily — and 
> then use
> the enclosure to repurpose the old drive. Or you can buy an external drive 
> dock,
> which lets you pop in a bare drive, copy data, and pop it out again — 
> without the
> hassle of using enclosures.
> My favorite dock is the $45 Thermaltake BlacX ST0005U (
> info page
> ), shown in the photo below. This device has both USB 2.0 and eSATA ports, 
> giving
> up to 3Gbps data transfers if your notebook has an eSATA port or an 
> ExpressCard slot
> with eSATA card. For those on the cutting edge, Thermaltake also makes a 
> USB 3.0
> version, the BlacX 5G ST0019U.
> Thermaltake BlacX ST0005U
> The BlacX accepts any 2.5- or 3.5-inch SATA drive, and in most cases, no 
> extra drivers
> are needed. (One is available for download, if for some reason your system 
> does not
> recognize the dock.) Just plug the dock into your notebook, pop in your 
> drive, and
> Windows should automatically mount it. Then use the Seagate DiscWizard or 
> other cloning
> utility to copy your data over.
> If you have older IDE drives as well as SATA, consider the $50 StarTech 
> UNIDOCK2U
> (
> info page
> ), which accepts both types of drives and has a USB 2.0 interface.
> Docks are handy for much more than drive upgrades. Other common uses 
> include making
> full-drive backups, rescuing data from failing drives, and securely 
> erasing old drives
> before disposal. For more on that topic, see Fred Langa's Langalist Plus
> item
> , "Is data-wiping deleted files worthwhile?," in the paid section of 
> Windows Secrets.
> Corporate and education IT people also use docks to clone disk images for 
> mass installations.
> If you handle bare drives more than once or twice a year, the expense of a 
> dock will
> be nothing compared to the time and cost of using enclosures.
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