Laptop
Tested: New Hybrid Hard Drives From Samsung and Seagate
Tests show some clear benefits–but other results were inconclusive.
When they were introduced a couple of years ago, hybrid hard drives seemed enticing. Pairing a standard hard drive with a flash component sounded like a good way to deliver on the theoretical performance boosts that flash can offer while still providing the long-standing price, capacity, and performance benefits of hard disks.
We looked at Seagate’s Momentus 5400 PSD drive, announced today, and Samsung’s SpinPoint MH80 drive, released this summer. Both models are 2.5-inch, 160GB notebook drives with 256MB of nonvolatile flash memory cache on board. The hard-drive industry concentrated on introducing the new technology in laptop drives because notebooks would be more likely to reap the benefits that hybrid tech promises, including faster boot time and power savings.
The PC World Test Center examined the $190 Seagate Momentus 5400 PSD and the $299 Samsung SpinPoint MH80 alongside a $250 non-hybrid Hitachi Travelstar 7K200 (HTS722020k9SA00). We tested all three drives on a Dell Inspiron 1520, running a Core 2 Duo T7300 2-GHz CPU and 2GB of memory.
These first-generation hybrid drives incorporate only 256MB of NAND flash, a pittance in comparison with the 2GB USB flash drive you can buy today for $20. But the memory in the older drive is typically multilevel cell flash (MLC) as opposed to the more reliable–and more expensive–single-level cell flash (SLC) that hybrid drives, as well as SSD models, use. Manufacturers say they decided on 256MB of flash in hybrid drives as an entry point that wouldn’t throw the cost of the product out of whack when compared with the cost of a standard 2.5-inch hard drive.
Andy Higginbotham, director of sales and marketing for Samsung’s Hard Disk Drive Group, notes that NAND flash’s cost per gigabyte is expected to decrease by about 50 percent per year. Considering that timeline, Higginbotham says, we can expect to see hybrid hard drives incorporate 512MB of flash in 2008, 1GB of flash in 2009, and 2GB in 2010–all for the same cost as integrating 256MB today.
