Momuntos Hybrid drive

Looks like a 500gb hard drive with 4gb of slow cache. Weird concept. The point to ssds is the near zero seek times and lack of moving parts, for any data outside of the 4gb this drive is going to seek much like a mechanical drive.

I wouldn't go quite so far as to call it a stupid idea, but it wouldn't be much of a stretch. Hilariously they're significantly more expensive than hard drives too.
 
JonJ678 said:
Looks like a 500gb hard drive with 4gb of slow cache. Weird concept. The point to ssds is the near zero seek times and lack of moving parts, for any data outside of the 4gb this drive is going to seek much like a mechanical drive.

I wouldn't go quite so far as to call it a stupid idea, but it wouldn't be much of a stretch. Hilariously they're significantly more expensive than hard drives too.
Click to expand...

The entire point is compromise. As a replacement laptop drive, where you might need more in the way of storage than an SSD, but still wouldn't mind a speed increase, then this offers an alternative.

Yes, they cost more than an normal 2.5" drive (about twice as much), but they're also a lot cheaper than a pure SSD given you get more storage space thrown in.

Anyway, some numbers if you're interested.

Admittedly, they'd have to close the price gap if they want to take a chunk out of the desktop market, but it's a 2.5" drive, so they don't seem to be targetting that sector anyway (would have thought they'd have bunged a bit more SSD memory on a larger 3.5 drive if they were).
 
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The hybrid drives make a lot of sense, the SSD section is just considered a cache.

It does not really matter that the SSD part is small (in relation to HDD size) as vast majority of files on HDD (or SSD) are never accessed regularly anyway.

The hybrid drive does not loose performance also, as every time the HDD disk part is de-fragmented, the SSD part is wiped clean for a fresh start (trim not required).

They should also be very reliable, as the SSD part will cut down mechanical access, and as the SSD part is only acting as cache, if any of the SSD memory fails it still continues as data always on the HDD part.

A good analogy of hybrid drives is between a CPU's cache memory speed, and the speed of main memory. Similar to CPU cache, providing the drives used as boot/application a high percentage of hits will be from the SSD part.

One downside however is all writes go directly to the HDD section, and of course you loose the advantage of total silence over SSD. I have development files stored on SSD, and every time I compile it's nice not to hear a HDD clicking away, you loose this benefit with hybrid.

As a prediction for years to come: When SSD's becomes cheaper to produce than HDD's (bound to happen some point) I reckon SSD drives will use the same technique employed here, where they use different speed flash memory. Cheaper slower flash memory for main capacity, and smaller but faster (more expensive) flash memory to intelligently move most regularly accessed files to.
 
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