Seagate teases "game-changing" drive, coming May 26

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Matthew DeCarlo

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The pros and cons of mechanical and solid-state drives have been thoroughly discussed. Disk drives offer unmatched storage capacities at bargain basement prices, while flash memory is quicker, quieter and less power hungry, but inherently more expensive. Seagate might harness the best of both worlds with a new product teased today.


Billed as a "game-changing device," Seagate's undisclosed storage product is believed to be the Momentus XT, which is currently up for preorder on ProVantage for $133.84. Seagate claims its new unit boosts system performance by up to 150% and can "learn about its user to dynamically decrease disk time, boot time, and application load time."

Based on ProVantage's product page, the 2.5-incher carries 500GB of mechanical storage along with 4GB of SLC NAND memory, and rumors suggest it will ship with Asus' ROG G73Jh gaming laptop. More information will be available soon enough, with the big unveiling slated for Wednesday, May 26 at 11AM PST.

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I just hope it is more stable than their current Hard Drives are.
I buy several hundred drives a year and have gone to WD as the sole provider after nothing but failure after failure with Seagate drives.
No matter how fast they make them if they can't build some reliability into them it is a waste of time.
 
Guest said:
I just hope it is more stable than their current Hard Drives are.
I buy several hundred drives a year and have gone to WD as the sole provider after nothing but failure after failure with Seagate drives.
No matter how fast they make them if they can't build some reliability into them it is a waste of time.
Its funny, I used to argue about this until I realized how it is. For me, its the DEAD opposite way around, and I've met plenty that swear to one side because the others always fail on them. I have no idea how it happens, but it does.
 
i used to swear by seagates until their 7200.10 series. i bought three drives of that generation and RMA'd five of them, including two of the returned drives. most were just bad drives, large numbers of bad sectors, but one had a spindle problem, and one of the "factory re certified" drives have a bad motor in it, wouldn't spin up the drive half the time.
That said, the one constant for hard drives from my experience is that WD has always made bricks. They work great for a year or two, and then the click of death starts. I have switched to Hitachi or Samsung drives, I haven't had a deskstar crash since the old IBM days.
 
Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about but how would 4GB help? What can you store on it? Would it just be a bigger cache?
 
Yes it would just be a bigger cache. Depending on how smart the drive is it could put a ton of files on it that you use everyday. Pretty much this just adds another level of caching. It could also put page files on the flash. Maybe even put boot files on the flash for faster start times. Pretty much the more cache you have the less chance you have to do a hdd read.
 
hello ...

interesting indeed, will keep an eye on this & sure hope will be up to our expectations

cheers!
 
article said:
learn about its user to dynamically decrease disk time, boot time, and application load time.

Hmm.... Hardware learning about the user. Sounds like the beginning of Skynet to me.

On a more serious note, aren't "hybrid" drives, which have been touted as the stepping stone between the HDD, and full fledged SSD been discussed for quite a while already? I would be surprised if this is one of many hybrids that will be released, given that the price of SSDs would continually drop, and sales of SSDs isn't exactly crawling....
 
Can't see this being game changing. Seagate missed the boat with hybrid by a few years. 150% boost in performance over standard hard drives? Standard hard drives are not the benchmark anymore.
 
I find it funny that people think SSD's are "in" right now. Seeing how you can Raid 0 two Raptors and get better performance for the same price with more storage.
 
Correct me if i'm wrong (It's the internet, someone always does) but aren't SSD finite in the amount of read/writes? I'm fairly sure it's a lifetime of 20+ years or some such, but it still leaves me with an "I'm being cheated" kinda feeling. These drives will rock nonetheless, and I look forward to the reduced boot and game load times.
 
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