OCZ plays its joker in the hybrid drive card game OCZ has put its hybrid drive cards on the table in the shape of the RevoDrive Hybrid, with 1TB of spinning disk and 100GB of flash, gambling that punters will go for that combination of flash speed and disk capacity at a 45¢/GB price. A prototype was shown in July and its specifications have been uprated. That had 60GB of …
500 dollarydoos !!! whats the point. If it were half the price and had double the flash then maybe.
The thing is hybrid drives aren't really economicly viable. For storage and backup spinny drives are the solution, and for fast boot and program drives ssd's are just the thing. For servers arrays of spinny drives are the most obvious solution for speed/size/price, at least until flash prices drop
The problem is that you can get a 120GB SSD for £133 and a seperate 1TB HDD for £38. That's £175 inc delivery. OK it's not a hybrid, but most people will put the OS on the SSD and store stuff on the HDD. Job done.
Is the extra cost worth the benefits of the hybrid?
Probably not for most people. It surely has a limited appeal for the cost.
I guess OCZ (and the other hybrid makers) are hoping that instead of YOU deciding how to split your data across two (or more) drives, their caching thingies can do a better, without you having to deal with separate partitions and what-not. But 500 quid is a lot to ask for that.
I still prefer to segregate. Stick all the criticals on a red hot pci-ssd and offload all media to cheap storage.
Jack of all trades, master of none? I guess it will come down to pricing but I won't be buying. Especially as mainstream ssd's are getting dirt cheap.
When I first got my z-drive I had to shell upwards of 1000 squid. Now sata3 drives are available for less than 100.
This formfactor was very common for a while in the late 1980s, when it was called a "hardcard". Never thought I'd see them again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardcard
It would seem to me that technologically, there would be greater efficiency in the OS managing the "cache" of fast Flash between the system and the disk - but then again, caching hard disk controllers worked pretty well, and today, running one OS under another with a Type 2 hypervisor often results in great disk performance from the guest as the host manages caching for it...
Lots of disk - check
ssd write cache - check
ssd read cache - check
Scaleable - check
Tuneable - check
dedupe - check
compression - check
Although it has to be said that dedicating 4-6Gb of ram at a minimum is a good idea, I'm running 18Tb of 5400rpm 2Tb drives on my home media server with 64Gb of ssd on the side to keep performance acceptable. (The array performs better than the Momentus XT drive I keep the OS on...)
It's a real trip down memory lane to see hardcards again though.
Sounds very nice - except my OCZ SSD has just died after 6 months use. I found a HDD review site which claims ~15% failure rate on Sandforce controllers (not sure which model). This seems ridiculously high to me.
Anyway my SSD is winging it's way to the Netherlands for replacement but do I trust their drives with my data in the future?
This new hybrid seems like there are now many components which can fail - I'm seriously starting to question the value of an SSD, unless you pay for a tier 1 Intel jobbie. Good luck being an early adopter to this technology, be sure to have a decent backup procedure.
"$499.99, which is not outrageous"
Really, can I have a job please? Reg hacks must be on a pretty decent whack by the sound of it, I'd balk at paying that for my entire base unit.
Before reading this article I was getting ready to order a Momentus XT for my ailing laptop, after reading it, I'm more sold on the Seagate than ever.
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