Yeah, but polish it well, put some glitter on it, a thick layer of varnish, put it in a shiny package and plenty of dummies will line up to buy it at a premium.
I'm betting that the drives aren't sophisticated enough to properly cache the right things and maintain consistent healthy performance.
I mean, you're caching the entire OS and several apps with 128gb. Seagate's tech probably just isn't good enough to justify the additional cost and they know it. There's no way someone hasn't internally tested such a drive.
Is there any news on the details of the NAND? Everyone is always saying that 8GBs is too little (I entirely agree) but what about things like technical specs of that NAND? Is it some planar MLC bargain bin stuff? Let the manufacturers know we care about this sort of product, maybe they will take a hint that there is an unserved market!
If they're so cheap as to use only 8GB, you can bet your life it is the lousiest, lowest quality, USB2-flash-drive-quality flash they could lay their hands on... Clearly quality engineering was not driving the design.
I don't think this is meant to cache whole programs (it will cache them, though not by choice). It's meant to cache your data, such as the photos you edit or the levels a game loads. Those will fit nicely into 8GB. But that's just my hunch, I'll wait for proper reviews to see how it actually behaves in the real world.
I think it's supposed to behave as one drive and cache files which are frequently accessed. So obviously it won't do the whole Windows folder but if you're playing a whole game, it's not going to load the next level into the DRAM for you unless the associated files have been accessed frequently. So whilst it'll probably make your system boot quickly and any startup programs will load quickly, game performance is going to be meh and even if it did manage to anticipate caching the next level, etc I honestly don't think 8GB is really enough for that, plus your OS / frequent programs - look at the size of some new games. It's staggering. My SSD weeps at the sight of the system requirements. As does my wallet, for that matter. I can honestly see your point in that it won't cache the entirely Windows folder but individual, regularly accessed files but I still think that to provide any meaningful increase in responsiveness on anything other than a basic word processing, internet browsing machine (normally budget machines where budget is usually king and no type of SSD will feature) which usually will be better off spending their budget on more RAM or a better CPU. That said, I do appreciate that SSDs are the best thing to happen to PC responsiveness for a long time and it's probable that access times and transfer speed are bottlenecks to even low end machines.
These drives seem like an oxymoron to me, SMR is known to offer poor performance, especially in random writes, yet its paired with a small portion of NAND to attempt to speed it up. I'm really curious to see some benchmarks with these used as DAS by Ganesh, because this product just doesn't make sense to me.
Perhaps a larger NAND, say 32GB and 7200RPM speed would make more sense. From a marketing perspective this FireCuda branding should be top tier performance above all else. They should have stuck to smaller capacities and PMR to ensure that.
My main laptop still uses a Seagate hybrid drive and its been reasonably quick for the time I've had it. Not going to bother upgrading it and will just get a new machine eventually.
It's sad that my nearly 5 year old 2nd gen Momentus XT 750gb that's 7200 rpm and 8gb of SLC is the epitome of hybrid drives.
I have the same drive. I am actually very impressed with how it has stood up over the past 5 years. It isn't an SSD, but it is noticeably faster than a standard 5400 rpm drive. It is still in my old Lenovo hackintosh.
I still have that drive as well. 7200RPM, 750GB hybrid. The last of the 7200RPM hybrid drives...reliable for many years so far. Makes some scratching noises if the drive is busy while experiencing angle changes, like tilting the drive, but that is common on all their drives. but I thought the FireCuda's were 7200RPM for laptops again?
It's funny that so many people have commented that 8GB of NAND is not enough. That is the first thing I thought. I've used the hybrid drives with 8GB many times. 8GB only seems to be enough to help with boot times. Even then they still don't compare to a real SSD, even a crappy one.
At this point in time I think a very small nand cache makes more sense than a much larger one.
A few years ago when a $200 SSD wasn't enough space for many users, and most laptops only had a single 2.5" bay, a $80-110 SSD + $50-70 HDD package for $150-200 (assuming $20 for the bridge hardware/software) would've been a reasonable option. Now a $200 SSD can service >95% of the consumer market (outliers primarily being gamers and people with large media collections) the potential market for a premium SSHD is largely gone. Instead 2.5" HDDs are mostly used in race to the bottom laptops sold to very price sensitive customers. Adding more than a few dollars to the BoM would either wipe out the miniscule profit margins or push up the price causing the consumers who buy them to go for the other one that's "almost the except its silver plastic instead of black and $25 cheaper".
I'd be interested in seeing one of these benchmarked; but conventional tests probably wouldn't be well suited. The heavy IO of most storage benches would quickly crush them into pure HDD mode, which'd defeat the whole point. Things like the PCMark Suite (simulating day to day usage) with something in the background tracking IO delays to see if/how much it cuts down on latency spikes would probably be the best bet. I doubt the raw PCMark scores would shift a lot; but if there're 25% fewer pauses for the user to swear at, that's not a bad return for a marginal upgrade of a cheapo product.
I think the skepticism is based on the price. A traditional (non-shingled) 1TB 2.5" drive costs around $45..$55. This thing costs 40% more than that. For 40% more, you'd expect a SUBSTANTIALLY better experience, but most of us expect that the 8GB of flash will not be enough to cover the lousiness of the SMR experience. (SMR has its place, as a backup drive, but do you want to swap to it?)
You're suggesting that the tradeoffs here make sense given the economics of these drives in general; our point is that they don't. There is no obvious reason why OEM CheapLaptopsRUs would use this drive rather than a low-end Hitachi or Toshiba or Samsung.
Not quite. My point was that a premium SSHD is DOA, only tiny cache models still make any sort of sense in the current market. I wasn't commenting on its current price/value; because I'd assumed with nothing in the article it was a paper launch with no prices available yet.
I agree that if it actually stays at launch price, you're right about it not going anywhere. OTOH I expect its baseline non-sale price to drop to around $60 fairly quickly (just like all the budget SSDs that try to launch at Samsung prices before dropping precipitously because their controllers suck); at that point it might be worthwhile. Depends how well the flash cache actually works at hiding the SMR suckage. It's really make more sense paired with a conventional PMR drive IMO.
Remember , this is a 2TB drive, not 1TB. Right now on newegg you can get a 2TB (I ASSUME PMR) drive for $100 -- this goes for $120 on newegg right now. If the performance is any better, I'd say it's worth the $20. I would be using it as a storage drive so mostly write once read many anyways so it would be very well suited to my workloads.
Well, I guess you can get 500GB, 1tB and 2TB versions -- I only compared the 2TB because I already have a 1TB in there and want more space. I wonder if a 15MM drive would fit, then I could get 4-5TB
Make them 7200 RPM and give them at the very least 32GiB of NAND, and then it's probably worth it for laptops that only have one bay and need a lot of storage. As it is.. uh..
WD should have slapped out a Raptor with 16GB of flash at least 4-5 years ago. Now I would rather have just a really good quality 2.5" 7200rpm drive with pre flood tolerances.
To all the naysayers, I say wait until representative benchmarks are available. Consider the performance implications of SMR:
- Small writes can be slow, as you can't write in place, and instead have to write large blocks (multiple overlapping shingled tracks). - Sequential large writes can be as fast as regular HDD, as the writes might be sufficiently multi-track to be able to written in SMR blocks in their entirety. - Sequential reads can be slow, as sequential data may be spread between blocks of tracks, depending on how writes are combined. - Random reads are no different to random reads on regular HDD. The randomizing element will send the head all round the disk in both cases, so average latency should be roughly the same.
These characteristics look a lot like FLASH blocks to me, and the same tricks used in FLASH controllers can be used here. The controller can write data in a log structured fashion, combining writes chronologically into a single block of SMR tracks. Over time, GC in the controller can unpick the randomly written SMR blocks, and compact then into multiple sequential blocks, thus potentially solving the sequential read issues.
In fact, writes in general need not be the bottleneck in SMR, as write combining all the outstanding writes into a single SMR block would write them quicker than if they had to be updated in place as in a regular HDD.
For all other latency bottlenecks (usually random reads), the NAND flash can fill the void so long as the working set of data in the cache is carefully chosen. And modern computers have sooooo much memory these days that the working set of data is often in RAM already anyway. I've not upgraded my 16GB RAM laptop to an SSD simply because I'm not limited by the HDD performance, because my entire working set of data is RAM resident already.
That said, the value proposition needs to be more compelling over regular HDD before I'd consider buying one. I'm not sure it is at the prices mentioned.
Hybrid drives are standard hard drives with solid state memory added. For example, the FireCuda 2TB has 8GB of solid state memory in addition to the usual 2TB of magnetic recording capacity. Don't confuse this 8GB of solid state memory with the usual buffer cache memory, which is typically 32MB to 128MB.
bah. They're still sticking to 8GB flash as they started out with Seagate Momentus XT 500GB. That tech is like many years older now. Wish they had sometthing like 128GB flash. Even bootup won't fit in 8gb cache. Let alone games etc.
Well, the Momentus XT500GB was 4GB Flash. The 750GB XT was also 7200RPM, but 8GB Flash. Then came the crappy 500GB and 1TB 5400RPM "SSHD" branded ones. Now this. And I can't tell if it's 5400 or 7200RPM really. Newegg's page for it says 7200RPM. Hmm
I was considering updating my older gen seagate 1tb sshd to the 2tb variant of these and now I wont.
Sadly seems a lot of bait and switching happening here.
Older gen sshd's have SLC nand and dont use shingled platters.
These latest models have the horrible shingled platters, and have downgraded SLC to MLC, that might be ok if it meant something like more NAND but its still the same size, so its not like we trading less SLC for more MLC, its same SLC for same MLC. Bear in mind the NAND is probably going to get a lot of writes and with there not been much of it then wear levelling will be more limited than what would expect on a typical SSD. Although its entirely possible its planar SLC been changed to 3D MLC.
Sadly a ps4 storage review site is recommending these drives, without realising how slow shingled can be.
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extide - Friday, October 21, 2016 - link
Finally!, Geez, it seemed obvious to me that SMR + NAND was a great idea .. it sure took em long enough though!extide - Friday, October 21, 2016 - link
And, what a bunch of cheap asses, still only 8GB of NAND..?ddriver - Friday, October 21, 2016 - link
So they put a lousy ssd inside a lousy hdd and came up with a lousy name for it... I am sure it will be great LOLedlee - Friday, October 21, 2016 - link
i fully agree, 8gb of nand is pathetic, at least do 32Gb at the bare minimumTheinsanegamerN - Friday, October 21, 2016 - link
32GB nand and 7200RPM spin speed.Arnulf - Saturday, October 22, 2016 - link
This is a SMR drive. You can polish a turd but it's still a turd.ddriver - Saturday, October 22, 2016 - link
Yeah, but polish it well, put some glitter on it, a thick layer of varnish, put it in a shiny package and plenty of dummies will line up to buy it at a premium.edward1987 - Friday, December 2, 2016 - link
I upgraded my PS4 with this 2tb SSHD (ST2000LX001) wroks really great!edward1987 - Monday, December 5, 2016 - link
I just did quick search and looks like none apart from span .com have this HDD in stock, must be popular choice :)CaedenV - Friday, October 21, 2016 - link
8GB of Nand?Throw in 128GB and we will talk
ImSpartacus - Friday, October 21, 2016 - link
I know, right?I'm betting that the drives aren't sophisticated enough to properly cache the right things and maintain consistent healthy performance.
I mean, you're caching the entire OS and several apps with 128gb. Seagate's tech probably just isn't good enough to justify the additional cost and they know it. There's no way someone hasn't internally tested such a drive.
michael2k - Monday, October 31, 2016 - link
Even so, these drives still boast 3x better performance than normal spinning discs:http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_laptop_sshd_1...
80mb/s in the middle of a gaming session isn't terrible. A standard seagate drive only gets 26mb/s:
http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_mobile_hdd_re...
chrcoluk - Monday, December 31, 2018 - link
thats an older gen model tho, has SLC and isnt SMR.zodiacfml - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link
LOL. WD can beat them to this.philehidiot - Tuesday, November 1, 2016 - link
*Checks size of Windows 7 folder*Hmm... Just the Windows folder, which you'd want on the SSD side, is 12GB on this system.
Yeh, this is certifiably shite.
Robert Pankiw - Friday, October 21, 2016 - link
Is there any news on the details of the NAND? Everyone is always saying that 8GBs is too little (I entirely agree) but what about things like technical specs of that NAND? Is it some planar MLC bargain bin stuff? Let the manufacturers know we care about this sort of product, maybe they will take a hint that there is an unserved market!CaedenV - Saturday, October 22, 2016 - link
if they added more they wouldn't have to be so worried about endurance...name99 - Saturday, October 22, 2016 - link
If they're so cheap as to use only 8GB, you can bet your life it is the lousiest, lowest quality, USB2-flash-drive-quality flash they could lay their hands on...Clearly quality engineering was not driving the design.
Lolimaster - Sunday, October 23, 2016 - link
Lasts hybrid drives had a shi*tty mlc, nand, for 8GB don't expect anything better even if its 2016.With quality 500GB SSD prices, these type of products are DOA.
Morawka - Friday, October 21, 2016 - link
Moar Nand Please, 8GB won't even fit photoshop CC onto the nand for fast operationbug77 - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link
I don't think this is meant to cache whole programs (it will cache them, though not by choice). It's meant to cache your data, such as the photos you edit or the levels a game loads. Those will fit nicely into 8GB.But that's just my hunch, I'll wait for proper reviews to see how it actually behaves in the real world.
philehidiot - Tuesday, November 1, 2016 - link
I think it's supposed to behave as one drive and cache files which are frequently accessed. So obviously it won't do the whole Windows folder but if you're playing a whole game, it's not going to load the next level into the DRAM for you unless the associated files have been accessed frequently. So whilst it'll probably make your system boot quickly and any startup programs will load quickly, game performance is going to be meh and even if it did manage to anticipate caching the next level, etc I honestly don't think 8GB is really enough for that, plus your OS / frequent programs - look at the size of some new games. It's staggering. My SSD weeps at the sight of the system requirements. As does my wallet, for that matter. I can honestly see your point in that it won't cache the entirely Windows folder but individual, regularly accessed files but I still think that to provide any meaningful increase in responsiveness on anything other than a basic word processing, internet browsing machine (normally budget machines where budget is usually king and no type of SSD will feature) which usually will be better off spending their budget on more RAM or a better CPU. That said, I do appreciate that SSDs are the best thing to happen to PC responsiveness for a long time and it's probable that access times and transfer speed are bottlenecks to even low end machines.Sorry, I'm rambling. Too many opiates.
creed3020 - Friday, October 21, 2016 - link
These drives seem like an oxymoron to me, SMR is known to offer poor performance, especially in random writes, yet its paired with a small portion of NAND to attempt to speed it up. I'm really curious to see some benchmarks with these used as DAS by Ganesh, because this product just doesn't make sense to me.Perhaps a larger NAND, say 32GB and 7200RPM speed would make more sense. From a marketing perspective this FireCuda branding should be top tier performance above all else. They should have stuck to smaller capacities and PMR to ensure that.
Seagate...?
Yuriman - Friday, October 21, 2016 - link
I have a 500GB 2nd gen drive sitting unused in a box under my bed. I was not impressed.cbm80 - Friday, October 21, 2016 - link
Meh...would be better to have an SLC write buffer. Forget "boot times", concentrate on making the drive perform more like non-shingled.milli - Friday, October 21, 2016 - link
Why would they decrease the cache from 32GB to 8GB again?ST1000LX001 had 32GB NAND.
trulyuncouth - Saturday, October 22, 2016 - link
Those old drives on amazon are going for 3x the cost of these, I'd say its a matter of cost.Scipio Africanus - Friday, October 21, 2016 - link
My main laptop still uses a Seagate hybrid drive and its been reasonably quick for the time I've had it. Not going to bother upgrading it and will just get a new machine eventually.It's sad that my nearly 5 year old 2nd gen Momentus XT 750gb that's 7200 rpm and 8gb of SLC is the epitome of hybrid drives.
xTRICKYxx - Sunday, October 23, 2016 - link
I have the same drive. I am actually very impressed with how it has stood up over the past 5 years. It isn't an SSD, but it is noticeably faster than a standard 5400 rpm drive. It is still in my old Lenovo hackintosh.danwat1234 - Saturday, July 15, 2017 - link
I still have that drive as well. 7200RPM, 750GB hybrid. The last of the 7200RPM hybrid drives...reliable for many years so far. Makes some scratching noises if the drive is busy while experiencing angle changes, like tilting the drive, but that is common on all their drives. but I thought the FireCuda's were 7200RPM for laptops again?LordanSS - Friday, October 21, 2016 - link
Yes, 32GB of NAND should be minimum. I don't mind the lower spindle speed tho, platter density is good so sequential transfers should be reasonable.Lower spindle speed makes less noise and heat, which is a good thing.
Einy0 - Friday, October 21, 2016 - link
It's funny that so many people have commented that 8GB of NAND is not enough. That is the first thing I thought. I've used the hybrid drives with 8GB many times. 8GB only seems to be enough to help with boot times. Even then they still don't compare to a real SSD, even a crappy one.SunnyNW - Friday, October 21, 2016 - link
Probably a stupid question but what is that a picture of on the sshd in the article?DanNeely - Friday, October 21, 2016 - link
At this point in time I think a very small nand cache makes more sense than a much larger one.A few years ago when a $200 SSD wasn't enough space for many users, and most laptops only had a single 2.5" bay, a $80-110 SSD + $50-70 HDD package for $150-200 (assuming $20 for the bridge hardware/software) would've been a reasonable option. Now a $200 SSD can service >95% of the consumer market (outliers primarily being gamers and people with large media collections) the potential market for a premium SSHD is largely gone. Instead 2.5" HDDs are mostly used in race to the bottom laptops sold to very price sensitive customers. Adding more than a few dollars to the BoM would either wipe out the miniscule profit margins or push up the price causing the consumers who buy them to go for the other one that's "almost the except its silver plastic instead of black and $25 cheaper".
I'd be interested in seeing one of these benchmarked; but conventional tests probably wouldn't be well suited. The heavy IO of most storage benches would quickly crush them into pure HDD mode, which'd defeat the whole point. Things like the PCMark Suite (simulating day to day usage) with something in the background tracking IO delays to see if/how much it cuts down on latency spikes would probably be the best bet. I doubt the raw PCMark scores would shift a lot; but if there're 25% fewer pauses for the user to swear at, that's not a bad return for a marginal upgrade of a cheapo product.
name99 - Saturday, October 22, 2016 - link
I think the skepticism is based on the price. A traditional (non-shingled) 1TB 2.5" drive costs around $45..$55. This thing costs 40% more than that. For 40% more, you'd expect a SUBSTANTIALLY better experience, but most of us expect that the 8GB of flash will not be enough to cover the lousiness of the SMR experience. (SMR has its place, as a backup drive, but do you want to swap to it?)You're suggesting that the tradeoffs here make sense given the economics of these drives in general; our point is that they don't. There is no obvious reason why OEM CheapLaptopsRUs would use this drive rather than a low-end Hitachi or Toshiba or Samsung.
DanNeely - Sunday, October 23, 2016 - link
Not quite. My point was that a premium SSHD is DOA, only tiny cache models still make any sort of sense in the current market. I wasn't commenting on its current price/value; because I'd assumed with nothing in the article it was a paper launch with no prices available yet.I agree that if it actually stays at launch price, you're right about it not going anywhere. OTOH I expect its baseline non-sale price to drop to around $60 fairly quickly (just like all the budget SSDs that try to launch at Samsung prices before dropping precipitously because their controllers suck); at that point it might be worthwhile. Depends how well the flash cache actually works at hiding the SMR suckage. It's really make more sense paired with a conventional PMR drive IMO.
extide - Monday, December 12, 2016 - link
Remember , this is a 2TB drive, not 1TB. Right now on newegg you can get a 2TB (I ASSUME PMR) drive for $100 -- this goes for $120 on newegg right now. If the performance is any better, I'd say it's worth the $20. I would be using it as a storage drive so mostly write once read many anyways so it would be very well suited to my workloads.extide - Monday, December 12, 2016 - link
Well, I guess you can get 500GB, 1tB and 2TB versions -- I only compared the 2TB because I already have a 1TB in there and want more space. I wonder if a 15MM drive would fit, then I could get 4-5TBpiroroadkill - Saturday, October 22, 2016 - link
Make them 7200 RPM and give them at the very least 32GiB of NAND, and then it's probably worth it for laptops that only have one bay and need a lot of storage. As it is.. uh..Lolimaster - Sunday, October 23, 2016 - link
This things should inclue 16-32GB of SLC nand, REAL SLC and maybe 2-4GB LDDR3-4 as buffer cache.jabber - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link
WD should have slapped out a Raptor with 16GB of flash at least 4-5 years ago. Now I would rather have just a really good quality 2.5" 7200rpm drive with pre flood tolerances.TheWrongChristian - Monday, October 24, 2016 - link
To all the naysayers, I say wait until representative benchmarks are available. Consider the performance implications of SMR:- Small writes can be slow, as you can't write in place, and instead have to write large blocks (multiple overlapping shingled tracks).
- Sequential large writes can be as fast as regular HDD, as the writes might be sufficiently multi-track to be able to written in SMR blocks in their entirety.
- Sequential reads can be slow, as sequential data may be spread between blocks of tracks, depending on how writes are combined.
- Random reads are no different to random reads on regular HDD. The randomizing element will send the head all round the disk in both cases, so average latency should be roughly the same.
These characteristics look a lot like FLASH blocks to me, and the same tricks used in FLASH controllers can be used here. The controller can write data in a log structured fashion, combining writes chronologically into a single block of SMR tracks. Over time, GC in the controller can unpick the randomly written SMR blocks, and compact then into multiple sequential blocks, thus potentially solving the sequential read issues.
In fact, writes in general need not be the bottleneck in SMR, as write combining all the outstanding writes into a single SMR block would write them quicker than if they had to be updated in place as in a regular HDD.
For all other latency bottlenecks (usually random reads), the NAND flash can fill the void so long as the working set of data in the cache is carefully chosen. And modern computers have sooooo much memory these days that the working set of data is often in RAM already anyway. I've not upgraded my 16GB RAM laptop to an SSD simply because I'm not limited by the HDD performance, because my entire working set of data is RAM resident already.
That said, the value proposition needs to be more compelling over regular HDD before I'd consider buying one. I'm not sure it is at the prices mentioned.
jravak - Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - link
Forgive my ignorance, but why is it referred to as a "hybrid drive" at the end of the article?Koenig168 - Friday, October 28, 2016 - link
Hybrid drives are standard hard drives with solid state memory added. For example, the FireCuda 2TB has 8GB of solid state memory in addition to the usual 2TB of magnetic recording capacity. Don't confuse this 8GB of solid state memory with the usual buffer cache memory, which is typically 32MB to 128MB.bhvm - Friday, March 17, 2017 - link
bah.They're still sticking to 8GB flash as they started out with Seagate Momentus XT 500GB. That tech is like many years older now.
Wish they had sometthing like 128GB flash. Even bootup won't fit in 8gb cache. Let alone games etc.
danwat1234 - Saturday, July 15, 2017 - link
Well, the Momentus XT500GB was 4GB Flash. The 750GB XT was also 7200RPM, but 8GB Flash. Then came the crappy 500GB and 1TB 5400RPM "SSHD" branded ones.Now this. And I can't tell if it's 5400 or 7200RPM really. Newegg's page for it says 7200RPM. Hmm
chrcoluk - Monday, December 31, 2018 - link
I was considering updating my older gen seagate 1tb sshd to the 2tb variant of these and now I wont.Sadly seems a lot of bait and switching happening here.
Older gen sshd's have SLC nand and dont use shingled platters.
These latest models have the horrible shingled platters, and have downgraded SLC to MLC, that might be ok if it meant something like more NAND but its still the same size, so its not like we trading less SLC for more MLC, its same SLC for same MLC. Bear in mind the NAND is probably going to get a lot of writes and with there not been much of it then wear levelling will be more limited than what would expect on a typical SSD. Although its entirely possible its planar SLC been changed to 3D MLC.
Sadly a ps4 storage review site is recommending these drives, without realising how slow shingled can be.