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"Obviously Steve [Jobs] sits in a position that only Steve sits in, in terms of the offering that they provide to their customers and its obviously pretty competing," Seagate CEO Steve Luczo said during the Q&A section in the company's last earnings call. "I would say though that from what we know of the offering for example Apple, the percentage of their units that they sell with SSDs versus HDDs is a tiny fraction. I think it's under three percent, certainly under five percent. Obviously this isn't the first product that they've had." You can read the whole transcript of the conference call over at Seeking Alpha.
Luczo goes on to say that he's had a Macbook Air with an SSD in it for a year and half now and he finds "the lack of capacity" frustrating since he spends "a lot of time cleaning out files" in order to "make room for not a lot content." He also complains that his "SSD drive takes about 25, 30 seconds to boot now versus the 12 seconds" it took when he first bought it, though he admits that has more to do with the OS than the SSD technology. His point is that Seagate's hybrid HDD/SSD devices don't suffer from this same problem. "I think as Seagate introduced hybrid drive last quarter, you get basically the features and function of SSD at more like disc drive cost and capacity... So I think that's where mainstream notebook computing is going," he concluded.
User Comments: 76
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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
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Remember the CD Drive? SJ has a connection to the future...watch and learn
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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.
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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.
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Looks like the commenting prize worked XD
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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...
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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.
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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
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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.
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Hybrid drives can be a short-term solution until SSD's get cheaper and more reliable. Jobs may be right this time
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Seagate will go out of business with this mentality. For once steve jobs is right.
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I don't have an ssd, would like to, but hope to win one here. If Apple thinks they're so advanced, why don't they put a core ix processor, like a core i3, in one of their laptops? Apple taxation without representation.
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More space, cheaper price vs less space, higher price. the choice is clear. Less space and higher price! ( yea super fast, silent, cool, but then again also kinda iffy)
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I think Apple isn't wrong its on saying its the future of the notebook, but perhaps not the best idea for the PC. First off, a hybrid drive would be a decent upgrade for all of us who just cant afford a SSD. Second, hybrid drives (in my point of view) are just a step towards full SSD's anyway, but there is a definite need for hybrids because most laptops would really benefit from this. Think about it, to the average consumer, "Hybrid Drive" sounds really cool compared to "Solid State Drive" and me personally, i would rather have a laptop with a moderately priced Hybrid rather than an HDD. So in the near-future, i agree its a mainstream tech but over the long run we're all heading towards SSD's .
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With all that being said.....One word will explain it all, HYBRID.
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Sure, it's not disputable that in the short-term future, hybrids could easily dominate the disk drive sector. However, I don't think Steve Jobs is that shortsighted. He looks much further ahead and sees that SSD will be the storage device for consumer products, particularly notebooks. I don't think Steve Jobs is saying that SSD will be the future for servers and the like. He's very specific in what he's talking about and he's talking about the distant future, not the near future.
Think about it. A lot of technology that Apple came up with were not ones that there was an established market for and yet in a short period of time it created a new market for that product. What comes to mind is the iPod, and then the touch screen phone (iPhone), and now the iPad.
For critics who evaluate Steve Jobs's predictions, I would say before you quickly jump to your conclusions, ask yourself if your critique is about the near future or the distant future. I'm seeing that a lot of critics are shortsighted and only think about the near future.
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I like the hybrid drives. I like the speed advantage you get from the SSD part, and the capacity/price ratio that the platter based drive provides. Hybrid drives will be a great alternative until the price of SSD drives comes down in the mainstream market.
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Man!! last time i got a Seagate Hard Drive it crashed on me after about 2 month of having it and i lost everything, it was 1.5 TB. Seagate, it just trying to clean up their name with all the messy HDD they have created it, by trying to make something that probably won't go anywhere. They need to learn how to make HDDs before going into hybrids..lol. Now i don't like Apple PCs nor the idealism and monopoly that they have but i'm with Jobs on that one.
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princeton said:
Wow. I despise apple at times but seagate has lost their marbles. Their hybrid drive is far slower than an SSD. Why would the future be something far behind what we have in the present?
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princeton said:
Wow. I despise apple at times but seagate has lost their marbles. Their hybrid drive is far slower than an SSD. Why would the future be something far behind what we have in the present?
seagate isn't completely crazy, but they're looking at this the wrong way. the main turn off of getting a SSD is that they degrade(not sure exactly how this happens but they do) and they generally have less storage capacities for higher costs. eventually technology will reach a point where we have very large files and HDDs will not be fast enough for file storage, at this point, we will use SSDs even if they degrade. Right now, using SSDs in laptops is a pretty good choice. your normal laptops will become outdated within around 5 years, so the degregation of the SSDs doesn't really matter.
SSDs are Light, energy efficient, fast, have low power consumption, quiet, and durable. but they get worse over time, and cost more.
comparing a SSD to a HDD is like comparing a laptop to a desktop, the SSD has what u want and expect in a laptop, so it makes sense to use them in laptops.
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Steve is right here, SSD's are the future. However I don't see Apple bringing that future to the masses with the Macbook Air as they already overcharge for there hardware and SSD's will just bring another premium on top of that. But Luczo's comments are pretty baffling, while yes maybe right now SSD's aren't the best options for the average consumer, size and price will come down and offer a better deal down the road. This seems more of an attempt to push forward a product that's already outdated and has limited uses to the average consumer then anything else.
marioestrada said:"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." - Alan Kay
Apple has been predicting the future for a long time (iPod, iPhone, iTunes Store, iPad).
Science Fiction writing predicts & inspires the future, nerds & techies usually invent it and then either get bought up by a big company like Apple or create one. All of those products you listed weren't predicted by Apple, they just took them a step further gave them great marketing and put an i infront of them. Apple however is one of the best in the industry at taking existing ideas making them popular & appeal to the average consumer.
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