5 ms·

Because it costs an outrageous amount of money. I'm waiting for further development of hybrid drives, which are SSDs combined with a traditional hard drive for

by ENOTTY 16y ago

Because it costs an outrageous amount of money. I'm waiting for further development of hybrid drives, which are SSDs combined with a traditional hard drive for mass storage, but seen as one drive by the OS. The SSD is basically used a huge read cache. Current models of hybrid drives from Seagate have only 4 GB of SSD cache, which I don't feel is large enough.

ctide 16y ago
Since when is $200 an outrageous amount of money for a seriously significant performance increase?
- shin_lao 16y ago
  It's more than $ 200. It's more around $ 300 per computer and in a laptop it's an incredible amount of money ($800+ if I'm correct) if you have a Sony or an Apple one. Additionally the performance increase is important, but doesn't matter for everything network related. In other words I'd say it's almost worth what you pay for it.
  - ctide 16y ago
    I installed one in my Macbook Pro a few weeks ago for ~$300, but bought the 120 GB SSD vs. 80 GB. Considering I'm only using 60GB of it, I certainly could have bought the 80 GB and had everything shipped for right around $200. It's easily the most noticeable upgrade I've ever done.
  - rodh257 16y ago
    A vertex 2 is around $200 from what I can see: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227551&cm_re=vertex_2-_-20-227-551-_-Product http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227... If you buy a sony or apple laptop, replace the drive yourself. I just bought a 13" MBP and bought a $25 caddy to put my Vertex 2 in the DVD bay. That way I have Windows 7 booting from that SSD, OSX on the normal HDD with extra storage available there. Of course you could just replace the HDD with an SSD and not void your warranty.
    - shin_lao 16y ago
      Wouldn't that void the warranty?
      - rodh257 16y ago
        replacing the HDD with an SSD doesn't void the warranty, however replacing the DVD drive with one (like I did) does.
  - silencio 16y ago
    It is $200 or so for a decent 2.5" 128gb SSD that you can install into a laptop or a desktop (see http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100008120%204802&IsNodeId=1&name=Top%20Sellers http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&#3...). The only real problem with that solution is that 128gb isn't enough for some people, but it is not difficult to offload the data to another storage device, either internally or externally. I've been keeping under 128gb on my main laptops (MacBook Pro and Air) for a year and a half now (when I first switched over to using SSDs) without a problem.
  - catch23 16y ago
    Actually it's around $200 for a 100gig drive: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227529 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227... But you can always have more than 1 hard drive. Buy a 500gig one for all your large file content and use the smaller one for the OS. Pretty much all SSDs come in laptop drive format so I don't know where this $800 number is coming from. They might have been $800 last year, but transistor prices drop pretty fast. I have 2 drives in my macbook pro -- 120gig vertex 2 ssd, and a 500gig samsung "old style" hard drive.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- acqq 16y ago
  Since when it's a "serious" performance increase when "it boots faster"? Or if the first grep after the boot is faster (others must be fast since the file cache kicks in for every next one, unless you have, say, 128 MB RAM). Really not worth to mention.
  - rodh257 16y ago
    Applications start faster, loading any files from disk start faster. It depends on your usage scenario, but for .NET development in Windows I can vouch for it's value. $200 for an SSD is a far better use of money for the average programmer than say the upgrade from I5 to I7 on a 13" MBP. There are many parts of your computer which you'd spend $200 on that get you less of a general every day performance boost than a SSD.
    - masklinn 16y ago
      > It depends on your usage scenario, but for .NET development in Windows I can vouch for it's value. The reality is that it significantly increases performances for all workloads but streaming videos (huge sequential reads). Most of computer usage is random access to small files, and that's a field where SSDs utterly annihilate rotating platters (not that rotas have any advantage but storage capacity, mind you, SSDs are also superior in seq read and write, but on random we're talking 2MB/s on 4k random write for a VelociRaptor to >200MB/s for a Vertex 3; 0.68MB 4k random read for a VR to >90MB for a Vertex 3, for sequential performances the difference will be a factor of 2 or 3 tops between a VR and a top-of-the-line SSD) The difference is, of course, even more impressive for laptop drives: most laptops don't house 10k, 10W monsters like the VRs
  - mpakes 16y ago
    Spoken like someone who has never used a machine with an SSD. My SSD is by far the best performance investment I've made in recent years. A fast CPU is worthless if you're burning 30% of your cycles waiting for the HDD to deliver your data. Relying on file cache is not good enough.
    - 16y ago
masklinn 16y ago
Hybrids are nowhere near the orders-of-magnitude improvements SSDs provide. And neither can they be. You won't see a hybrid able to saturate a 6Gbps SATA connection on random-access any time soon.
janjan 16y ago
No it's definitively not an outrageous amount of money. I have a 3 year old Thinkpad T61p with a still decent Core 2 Duo and 4 GB of ram. After three years it felt kind of slow so I had two options: 1) Buy a SSD for 250 Euro or 2) buy a completely new laptop for > 1000 Euro. I went the first route and after working with the SSD for half a year I'm pretty sure that an expensive new laptop with a traditional hard drive would not have resulted in such a tremendous speedup as the SSD did. So please don't think of the 200$ for an SSD as "these 200$ will buy me a new hard drive" but instead think of this investment as "these 200$ will buy me an awesome new computer".
artaxerxes 16y ago
Tried the Momentus XT. It was good... But they have been on 500/4 for a year now. Also have an optibay enroute for the MacBook. For my desktop I have gone for the Highpoint Rocketraid 1220. it's a two port SATA III <£50. Add a HDD of your choice and an SSD and you have your own hybrid logical disk. I am testing with a 500gb caviar black and an old OCZ Vertex 30gb.... Arrives today!
Andys 16y ago
The seagate hybrid drive is a scam; it scores worse on some benchmarks than seagate's own normal laptop HDD. It also only uses the cache for reads, and not writes. Writes is where the magic happens! If I wanted more read cache I'd just get more system RAM.
mvkel 16y ago
It's already been proven that hybrid drives perform as good as, or in some cases _slower_ than traditional platter drives. The SSD part is a marketing gimmick.
ENOTTY 15y ago
Wow, okay lots of replies and I'll address them here. First, a lot of people are talking about using two drives. On Windows this model does not work. Moving programs from C: to D: will often screw up registry settings and other crap like that. On OSX and Linux, thanks to a single root filesystem and symlinks, this model might work better. Furthermore, I have to manage moving files back and forth. This is a problem algorithms should take care of and no OS does this yet. Secondly, a lot of people are saying the Momentus benchmarks are terrible. This seems obvious. Any standard benchmark does not take advantage of a large read cache. You have to use some sector of data over and over again in order for the drive's algorithms to put it into the SSD cache. Read real world benchmarks here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3734/seagates-momentus-xt-review-finally-a-good-hybrid-hdd/2 http://www.anandtech.com/show/3734/seagates-momentus-xt-revi...

by ENOTTY 16y ago

ctide 16y ago

Since when is $200 an outrageous amount of money for a seriously significant performance increase?

shin_lao 16y ago
It's more than $ 200. It's more around $ 300 per computer and in a laptop it's an incredible amount of money ($800+ if I'm correct) if you have a Sony or an Apple one. Additionally the performance increase is important, but doesn't matter for everything network related. In other words I'd say it's almost worth what you pay for it.
- ctide 16y ago
  I installed one in my Macbook Pro a few weeks ago for ~$300, but bought the 120 GB SSD vs. 80 GB. Considering I'm only using 60GB of it, I certainly could have bought the 80 GB and had everything shipped for right around $200. It's easily the most noticeable upgrade I've ever done.
- rodh257 16y ago
  A vertex 2 is around $200 from what I can see: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227551&cm_re=vertex_2-_-20-227-551-_-Product http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227... If you buy a sony or apple laptop, replace the drive yourself. I just bought a 13" MBP and bought a $25 caddy to put my Vertex 2 in the DVD bay. That way I have Windows 7 booting from that SSD, OSX on the normal HDD with extra storage available there. Of course you could just replace the HDD with an SSD and not void your warranty.
  - shin_lao 16y ago
    Wouldn't that void the warranty?
    - rodh257 16y ago
      replacing the HDD with an SSD doesn't void the warranty, however replacing the DVD drive with one (like I did) does.
- silencio 16y ago
  It is $200 or so for a decent 2.5" 128gb SSD that you can install into a laptop or a desktop (see http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100008120%204802&IsNodeId=1&name=Top%20Sellers http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&#3...). The only real problem with that solution is that 128gb isn't enough for some people, but it is not difficult to offload the data to another storage device, either internally or externally. I've been keeping under 128gb on my main laptops (MacBook Pro and Air) for a year and a half now (when I first switched over to using SSDs) without a problem.
- catch23 16y ago
  Actually it's around $200 for a 100gig drive: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227529 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227... But you can always have more than 1 hard drive. Buy a 500gig one for all your large file content and use the smaller one for the OS. Pretty much all SSDs come in laptop drive format so I don't know where this $800 number is coming from. They might have been $800 last year, but transistor prices drop pretty fast. I have 2 drives in my macbook pro -- 120gig vertex 2 ssd, and a 500gig samsung "old style" hard drive.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
acqq 16y ago
Since when it's a "serious" performance increase when "it boots faster"? Or if the first grep after the boot is faster (others must be fast since the file cache kicks in for every next one, unless you have, say, 128 MB RAM). Really not worth to mention.
- rodh257 16y ago
  Applications start faster, loading any files from disk start faster. It depends on your usage scenario, but for .NET development in Windows I can vouch for it's value. $200 for an SSD is a far better use of money for the average programmer than say the upgrade from I5 to I7 on a 13" MBP. There are many parts of your computer which you'd spend $200 on that get you less of a general every day performance boost than a SSD.
  - masklinn 16y ago
    > It depends on your usage scenario, but for .NET development in Windows I can vouch for it's value. The reality is that it significantly increases performances for all workloads but streaming videos (huge sequential reads). Most of computer usage is random access to small files, and that's a field where SSDs utterly annihilate rotating platters (not that rotas have any advantage but storage capacity, mind you, SSDs are also superior in seq read and write, but on random we're talking 2MB/s on 4k random write for a VelociRaptor to >200MB/s for a Vertex 3; 0.68MB 4k random read for a VR to >90MB for a Vertex 3, for sequential performances the difference will be a factor of 2 or 3 tops between a VR and a top-of-the-line SSD) The difference is, of course, even more impressive for laptop drives: most laptops don't house 10k, 10W monsters like the VRs
- mpakes 16y ago
  Spoken like someone who has never used a machine with an SSD. My SSD is by far the best performance investment I've made in recent years. A fast CPU is worthless if you're burning 30% of your cycles waiting for the HDD to deliver your data. Relying on file cache is not good enough.
  - 16y ago

masklinn 16y ago

Hybrids are nowhere near the orders-of-magnitude improvements SSDs provide. And neither can they be. You won't see a hybrid able to saturate a 6Gbps SATA connection on random-access any time soon.

janjan 16y ago

No it's definitively not an outrageous amount of money. I have a 3 year old Thinkpad T61p with a still decent Core 2 Duo and 4 GB of ram. After three years it felt kind of slow so I had two options: 1) Buy a SSD for 250 Euro or 2) buy a completely new laptop for > 1000 Euro. I went the first route and after working with the SSD for half a year I'm pretty sure that an expensive new laptop with a traditional hard drive would not have resulted in such a tremendous speedup as the SSD did. So please don't think of the 200$ for an SSD as "these 200$ will buy me a new hard drive" but instead think of this investment as "these 200$ will buy me an awesome new computer".

artaxerxes 16y ago

Tried the Momentus XT. It was good... But they have been on 500/4 for a year now. Also have an optibay enroute for the MacBook. For my desktop I have gone for the Highpoint Rocketraid 1220. it's a two port SATA III <£50. Add a HDD of your choice and an SSD and you have your own hybrid logical disk. I am testing with a 500gb caviar black and an old OCZ Vertex 30gb.... Arrives today!

Andys 16y ago

The seagate hybrid drive is a scam; it scores worse on some benchmarks than seagate's own normal laptop HDD. It also only uses the cache for reads, and not writes. Writes is where the magic happens! If I wanted more read cache I'd just get more system RAM.

mvkel 16y ago

It's already been proven that hybrid drives perform as good as, or in some cases _slower_ than traditional platter drives. The SSD part is a marketing gimmick.

ENOTTY 15y ago

Wow, okay lots of replies and I'll address them here. First, a lot of people are talking about using two drives. On Windows this model does not work. Moving programs from C: to D: will often screw up registry settings and other crap like that. On OSX and Linux, thanks to a single root filesystem and symlinks, this model might work better. Furthermore, I have to manage moving files back and forth. This is a problem algorithms should take care of and no OS does this yet. Secondly, a lot of people are saying the Momentus benchmarks are terrible. This seems obvious. Any standard benchmark does not take advantage of a large read cache. You have to use some sector of data over and over again in order for the drive's algorithms to put it into the SSD cache. Read real world benchmarks here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3734/seagates-momentus-xt-review-finally-a-good-hybrid-hdd/2 http://www.anandtech.com/show/3734/seagates-momentus-xt-revi...