Seagate: Apple is wrong about SSDs, hybrids are the future

i think SSD's are great and could have had a much bigger explosion into the market if the cost per gigabyte wasnt so ridiculiously high. I think most enthusiasts will still stick with the SSD just to squeeze out as much power as possible but I'm guessing the retail market will switch to the hybrid.

I've really been contemplating a SSD purchase because usually the 1st thing to break down in my system is the mechanical parts of my hard drive, since the hybrids still have moving parts they really don't seem appealing.

SSD is the only way forward and prices will only go down. Classic HDDs offer more capacity but performance is not acceptable anymore - now that we have the alternative in SSDs. If Seagate doesn't adopt to this they will be left behind by new companies that are smart enough to see the future.

Have to agree with those saying the pure SSD drives are the way to go. As the prices go down and storage amounts increase this can only end one way. The floopy will go to the same place tape drives and 3.5 inch disks have gone. Also you have the fact that with no moving parts the failure rate on these drives will be much less than disked drives. Give it 3-5 years and we should see these showing up all over the place, not just user devices but in server rooms.

The biggest bottle neck in computer performance (other than the user) has always been the disk. Seagate knows this. The only reason the the CEO says otherwise is because they are releasing a hybrid. To say otherwise would simply put a huge damper on their sales.

Good grief. No one said HDDs are dead now. There is always a transition period. But there is ALWAYS a transition. SSDs are the future. Who knows what will come after that. But something will. And we will have this discussion again, just like when we went from floppies to hdds and when floppies died and the optical drive became the thing. And now that the optical drive is dying, the conversation is not just about SSDs vs HDDs.

Are they dead yet? No, they are still "happyyy, oh so happyyy!'. But they are about to be clobbered on the head. It is the nature of technology. Thank goodness. Otherwise we'd still be using an 8mhz processor with a 720 meg floppy and 640k of ram.

Joe

At the moment is kinda a hard call. SSD's are great for laptop's and other portable devices because of the lack of moving parts. Greater speed is always nice, especially with laptops. IDK about other ppls laptops but mine gets shut off all the time, then I want to look something up really quick on the go, and it takes forever to boot. So faster driver would be great there. But at the same time I like to drag around my 15gig music collection and a small collection of ripped DVD's to watch when I'm bored. That east up a small drive very quickly.
So I'm with the ppl that say the hybrid drives are only a temporary fix. Once SSD's become more common and the price per gig goes down, we are going to see a lot more of them.

maybe SSD drives hasnt reached acceptance over traditional HDDS yet is because of the price. traditional HDDs are a lot cheaper and is much more common in stores. most users doest really care about these stuff and just go with whatever goes in the package. maybe in a few years prices will drop and SDDs will catch up. SDDs are the future...well for me atleast

Remember the CD Drive? SJ has a connection to the future...watch and learn

remember this? it's a seagate pocket hard drive. i used to saw them regularly when visiting local computer shops. now? i hardly see any of them, regardless of any brand. more and more mp3 players are also using non-moving flash chips.

solid state solutions are not hardly the future once the price is competitive.

SSD's are the future, no doubt about it. Price vs performance of LCDs was terrible at first, look how that changed. The same is true of all technology.

Bluray vs DVD is one for that matter that is currently having the battle, but the cost is coming down dramatically already.

Looks like the commenting prize worked XD

Hybrids might have a chance if they had better marketing, right now only seagate promotes them, while ssd are backed by big companies like apple, ocz, kingston and corsair... If luczo wishes to have a chance seagate can't be the only one producing these drives...

As contradictional as it might sound, I could agree with both, as I see SSDs as being ultimately the future, but hybrids could very well become a sort of transition step between rotating and solid mediums. I'm not saying it's that definite, but they could very well turn out as a more appealing alternative for those on a tighter budget, at least for the while of SSDs still being not economical enough to justify the extra cost per GB to the performance boost.

I personally would rather go with the hybrid than with a SSD. I honestly haven't really experienced that speed and efficience of a SSD. I use 5400RPM and 7200RPM HDD's at home and they haven't really dissapointed me much. I don't have any complaints about their performance, but I am someone who doesn't really pay attention to the specs of a HDD except for its capacity.

If I were to buy a new HDD, then I would probably buy a hybrid as it provides more space than an SSD at a lower price. It is also much faster than a 7200RPM traditional HDD. I wouldn't mind seeing a decrease in boot times and game loading times, but I won't go and buy a SSD, just so that a game loads faster, or to use the computer 10sec before the normal time. I am quite patient and have a low blood pressure but an empty wallet!

Another thing is that SSD's are based on flash memory. Doesn't flash memory have limited write cycles. It might be less fragile but then again, who on earth will buy an expensive MacBook Air, and then drop it on the floor. That inner sane-ness in you should prevent you from dropping such an expensive and delicate piece of machinery (with all its beautiful white glorry) on the floor!

So basically, I would go with the optin which gives you more storage at a lower price .

i would buy a laptop with a SSD just for the speed increase and for the power savings. but for a desktop i want enough room for all my games, movies and pictures (which right now is pushing 500GB) but i dont want to pay a fortune for a SSD that big. So i think jobs is right in saying SSDs are the future but only for the mobile market (laptops and netbooks). for massive storage space at a decent price regular HDD or hybrids are a better choice i think.

Hybrid drives can be a short-term solution until SSD's get cheaper and more reliable. Jobs may be right this time

In my opinion, Mr. Jobs enjoys being ambiguous and throws out huge words.

"SSDs are the future."

What does the "future" refer to? Anyone can say "there will be flying cars in the future", and then 1000 years later say, "See? I was right, you guys are all fools for ignoring me in the first place." Actually adding an estimate or quantitative attribute takes a lot more foresight and makes the statement alot more valuable in my eyes.

Back to this hybrid / SSD thing. I don't see SSDs taking over anytime soon. Don't get me wrong, I have an X25-M G2 80GB in my desktop (along with Caviar Blacks and a Spinpoint) and the speed is very, very noticeable. However, there is just no way to store large amounts of data on it.

If you play games / have movies / have a music collection, you are almost forced to purchase a traditional hard drive. You don't need 270MB/s bandwidth to listen to Justin Bieber, but you sure as hell need the space to fit his music videos and promotional art. Same applies to videos (even more so).

Desktop owners have the flexibility to put whatever they want, but most notebooks have 1 HDD bay (some have 2). The ones with SSD netbooks have it even worse. Nearly every laptop user I know owns external HDDs + flash drives for smaller documents.

HDD space continues to be a large factor in "device bragging" among tech-tards (along with amount of RAM, VRAM, and clock speeds... bless their souls) and for good reason. Speed you can deal with by waiting (within reason), but there is no way to add more space other than deleting other things.

TL;DR version-
Jobs is right, but so is anybody with his kind of thinking. Hybrids are the most realistic immediate future. Buy a desktop and profit. Lol at laptop users lugging around power bricks, externals, and USB monitors.

Definitely agree with the maintenance part on an SSD. I just build a new rig where I maintain my OS on the SSD and have a mechanical drive for storage. It seems like I spend at least a few minutes of every day scanning the SSD to get rid of superfluous files.

But as mentioned, this seems to be an OS problem, not an SSD problem. If they can ever get that sorted out and the cost to a manageable level, I don't see mechanical drives lasting more than another decade.

I believe SSDs will thrive and not hybrid drives. That's because the more people will buy ssds, the cheaper they will get and the more they are bought, the faster they will get bigger(in capacity) due to research.

I recently read that the current price of an SSD is about $1.20 per Gigabyte an that the price is going to drop to $.50 per Gigabyte this time next year. But I can't remember my source.