The “Break it Down” Blog

The Register has a good writeup about how the big fan-fair around hybrid hard drives (hard drives that include 100s+ MB of flash ram on them to make access times faster) has gone largely unserviced.

Hitachi admits to the facts that the performance around the current Hybrid drives (Seagate and Samsung both have some out) are largely unimpressive, shaving a few seconds off of this benchmark and a few off of that benchmark, but not much more. Especially when you consider the added price premium.

Some techies speculate that when GBs worth of flash can be added to the drives, then we will truly see the speed increases… which is likely true since you are essentially creating a tiny SSD ontop of an existing HD, but the cost of that much flash ram would make producing and buy drives like that any time soon impossible.

So for the folks that have been holding out for amazing hybrid drives, save your time and money and go buy yourself some Raptors and give this idea another 2 years to bake before it’s main stream and fully optimized.