Seagate: Our tech will be better than WD's helium-filled hardness

Re: Hybrids

Actually it says 2 seconds slower.

I can attest to the fact that they are indeed greased weasel shit at boot times and in normal operation. You'd have a point if the cacheing algorithm were as dumb as fuck, but it isn't. Frequently accessed stuff stays cached and writing or reading a shedload from less frequently accessed files makes no difference, that goes straight to and from the rotating rust.

I've been running a 500Gb Momentus XT in this 'ere laptop for a year now, it's bloody quick and feels just like having an SSD, only bigger and a bloody sight cheaper. Takes a week or two for the cacheing algorithm to get used to what you do, but once it has its feet under the table it really flies. The slower access to big data makes no odds, as the main limitation there is not access time anyway.

The big plus for enterprise use is that they don't need defragmenting, it slows 'em down as it knackers the cacheing and you're back to square one on performance. Thus in an environment where the users are locked down and cannot run defrags themselves, it saves support effort defragging sclerotic machines.

For desktop or laptop drives, these things have the win on price/performance right now in spades and if you want capacity, space and speed, they're the only game in town unless you are King Croesus.

Re: helium?

Actually, it usually comes up with natural gas. Some areas in the ME have NG rich in helium - but NG gets burned

off, since there are no resources to ship/liquefy it. So, if resources become depleted, people will just have to

recover more. Since the US govt. has stopped forcing recovery, the price has gone up. A lot of things can be

done with just a noble gas like argon (almost 1% in the atmosphere), but helium had been used instead

because it was artificially cheap.

So, no, helium is not the first resource I'd worry about. Copper or lead or even phosphate deposits maybe, and

if everyone in the world gets an electric car, maybe even lithium.

>They need to focus on ramping up capacity now that they've proven the technology has real viability.

Well, they're targeting a larger market by selling lower capacity SSDs. 120GB is plenty for many people's primary OS and software, and some consider it good practice to keep their OS install at a size still practical to image back up - for system recovery reasons. Both 128 GB and 256GB SSDs come in around the 50p /GB mark, though carrying 3 year guarantees.

On the subject of guarantees, I'm assuming that a 1TB SSD has a greater chance of failing, and costs more to replace if it does, than a 256GB model. These factors will also influence its purchase price.

I'm sure you have good reasons for wanting bigger SSDs, but your requirements might not yet be mainstream.