Seagate launches first laptop HHD -- blames Vista drivers for poor performance

Finally, Seagate has joined the fray by shipping its first hybrid hard drive (HHD) to OEMs and thus making good on its pledge to the Hybrid Storage Alliance. The 2.5-inch Momentus 5400 PSD ships in 80-, 120-, and 160GB capacities with a SATA 1.5 interface, 8MB of cache, and 256MB of flash memory to buffer cached write requests to disk. Seagate's HHDs are said to reduce boot time from 40 to 32 seconds while cutting average power consumption from 0.78 to 0.45 watts. Not quite the hysterical orders of performance improvements and battery savings originally promised eh Microsoft, Samsung? According to Melissa Johnson, a Seagate product manager, the sub-par performance for all HHDs stems from first generation issues with both the BIOS and Vista device drivers, "they don't know how to utilize the flash." Oh dear.

[Via Extreme Tech]

[Kris S. @ Oct 8th 2007 8:11AM]

Yeah, I'll just wait for SSD's.

[Matthew Hilario @ Oct 8th 2007 11:47AM]

alienware got ssd's for their laps. 34gb for $500. TIGER UPPERCUT to the wallet.

[finnith @ Oct 8th 2007 11:55AM]

Hopefully we wont have to wait that long

[andy @ Oct 8th 2007 1:56PM]

Tiger Uppercut? Is that you SAGAT?

[pigfister @ Oct 8th 2007 3:30PM]

so why is vista slow and bloated, just ask sony and fellow drm buddies over at the mpaa:

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/005121.php

quote = link

"Today, the PC industry needs Hollywood more than Hollywood needs the PC. Most consumers rely on traditional consumer electronics devices to view DVDs and TV content, but companies like Microsoft are betting on the converged digital home and desperately want a bigger piece of the media device market. Because of the DMCA, Microsoft has to get permission to build devices compatible with Hollywood's DRMed content. So when Hollywood demanded that Microsoft lard Vista with restrictions to access high-def DVD and digital cable content, the software giant was in a weak bargaining position."

[steve @ Oct 8th 2007 9:14PM]

That still doesn't explain why Vista is bloated or slow, since none of that DRM is even in place when that type of content isn't being played. Get your facts straight, and quit posting irrelevant information.

And what exactly did that have to do with waiting for SSD's?

[strider_mt2k @ Oct 8th 2007 8:13AM]

Maybe not huge leaps, but every little bit helps.

As for Vista...

[chris @ Oct 8th 2007 8:15AM]

hmm tha only confirms that Vista is only half finished. Clearly a WinME 2, there's no doubt

[josh @ Oct 8th 2007 10:52AM]

Yeah, because completely replacing the entire windowing and graphics subsystem while maintaining backwards compatibility, redoing the entire networking stack to support IPv6 and a host of other new networking features intrinsically rather than haphazzardly tacking them on, implementing a far more advanced application audio framework, adding a score of new features such as ReadyBoost (incidentally, quantitatively proving that MS may indeed know something about using flash given the performance advantages), and a wealth of other reasonably large improvements is comparable to hastily tacking the Win2k shell onto the Windows 98 kernel in 6 months.

OS X was originally release unfinished and rushed, which is why the first couple of updates were both free and very significant (that isn't a comment on it's current state, but rather that the darling OS hasn't always had a shiney history). If you look at what is slated for SP 1 for Vista you don't see anywhere near the major features that Apple pushed in their first updates, because those type of updates really aren't needed.

A general guideline when making snarky comments; make sure you are making them from a position of knowledge and experience with the subject.

On the real subject at hand, as mentioned ReadyBoost, which caches commonly accessed files off on a flash drive, actually works very well. From what I understand the HHD implementation (on the MS side) functions similarly, where it essentially treats the flash on the drive in the same manner. I don't know the details specifically of the implementation, but I would hazzard that if there was some real flaw in the driver implementation, it would be that it reads the data from disk to ram and then writes back to flash, rather than simply performing the entire operation on the drive. Such a scheme would still give improvements, but it would obviously be quicker if it didn't require any external bus traffic to perform.

Still, those are some pretty decent gains regardless, and considering how much cheaper HHD is over SSD it seems it would be really worth the money.

[Kevin @ Oct 8th 2007 11:27AM]

While I would not put Vista on the same level of botch as Windows ME, I do have to say that it reliably forgets that I have a DVD drive. Usually a reboot will make it show up again, but this _is_ a level of hassle I would rather not deal with in the 'latest and greatest' PC OS.

[Darkest Daze @ Oct 8th 2007 3:48PM]

Clearly a post from someone who's never used Vista if you're comparing it to ME. With the newest drivers out, my vista machine is running as fast as my XP machine and hasn't had a single issue within the last 6 months. It seems that 90% of the problems are the manufacturers not making a decent driver fast enough. Between RC2 and now, my machine went from running 50% the speed of XP to 95-100% the speed. I personally think Seagate needs to work on a decent driver for this new tech they are putting out instead of assuming Vista will know how to work with it perfectly, even though this wasn't out when the system was made.

[Sneakz @ Oct 8th 2007 8:29AM]

40 to 32 seconds? My Mac can boot generally under 25 with a standard WD Scorpio 2.5" 5400RPM HD.

[2shae @ Oct 8th 2007 8:36AM]

My iMac in 18 sec ones.

[Joe @ Oct 8th 2007 8:48AM]

my mac... too fast to time
and able to be used as soon as i see the desktop

[Rhochi @ Oct 8th 2007 8:48AM]

grats, now lets get back on topic.

[LordPaul @ Oct 8th 2007 11:26AM]

That's because all that's on there is a bunch of fancy graphics and nothing else...

[Deluxe @ Oct 8th 2007 5:26PM]

Call me when once you get to the desktop, you can use basic applications ;)

[Deluxe @ Oct 8th 2007 5:30PM]

Oh and P.S.

LOLz LET ME GET MY +2 INCH RULER.

[dataminer49er @ Oct 8th 2007 8:38AM]

I can throw my Vista box out the window in under 10 sec.

[netposer @ Oct 8th 2007 8:39AM]

What do they mean by "boot time"? When exactly do they start and stop the timer? Vista loads pretty quickly...meaning I see the desktop but it takes a couple of minutes before I can actually use the system.

[slug @ Oct 8th 2007 9:29AM]

Boot time is from when you power up to when you can start using your pc/mac.
Lol i could probabaly boot, shut down and boot again on my macbook in the time it take for my pc to boot just once.

[reticulate @ Oct 8th 2007 8:46AM]

In before Vista haters.

Oh, wait..

[Tim Abbott @ Oct 8th 2007 8:56AM]

isn't Vista the blame for everything these days?

[strider_mt2k @ Oct 8th 2007 9:02AM]

My shoelace just broke!

STUPID VISTA!!

[David Clark @ Oct 8th 2007 12:21PM]

Wouldn't you think it'd be the responsibility of the device manufacturer of a new technology to provide drivers? *cough* But instead, we'll just blame the OS.

[james @ Oct 8th 2007 9:09AM]

Hating MS / Vista is the only way to push the Linux Agenda! Stupid Vista

[simon.nutsy @ Oct 8th 2007 9:21AM]

LOL great one of Vistas biggest pushing reasons was the HHDs Yet it doesnt even suport them correctly.... :/

[Ruben @ Oct 8th 2007 11:18AM]

No, that wasn't the biggest reason for pushing Vista. You are wrong.

[simon.nutsy @ Oct 8th 2007 11:28AM]

I said one of there biggest pushing points... As in one of its major advances... As in there PR lot went on about it enough to make you sick of hearing about it....

Bloody read what i said right.

[Leonard Nimrod @ Oct 8th 2007 9:27AM]

So far this technology has been a bust, but that doesn't mean it won't succeed in the future.The Wright Brother's first powered flight was only 120 feet only 103 years ago and look a the state of aeronautics today. The computer industry is still in it's infancy by comparison.

Anandtech.com did a write up with Intel's Robson technology. For those not in the know, it's SSD (NAND) built onto the motherboard which does the same thing--and competes--with the HDD manufacturers version of adding it to replaceable device.

I'm still not sure which is the better solution. On the one hand NAND is less likely to fail to there no need to make it replaceable like a HHD and it would theoretically be faster if it's closer to the processor and RAM, on the other hand, making it convenient to replace with the HDD which would add significant capacity over time would be a benefit. Only time will tell which tech will win.

As an aside, Despite Apple's desire to use future-forward hardware tech (e.g: forcing USB on us by removing Serial and Parallel) we won't see SSD HDDs or Robson in Macs until all the bugs are worked out. However, Intel and Apple are pretty tight these days so I think Robson does have a definitive advantage if Apple and Intel can make the tech worth while in terms of powersavings and speed... which doesn't seem to be the case yet.

[qwert @ Oct 8th 2007 9:29AM]

would this also work with a mac, or would it just work as a "normal" hd, without special drivers.
i dont care about boot time, i use sleep with my ibook, but saving juice for longer use with batteries would be sweet (as long as the savings are big enough, but wiht over a third less power cinsumption for the hd, it sounds quite good)

[slug @ Oct 8th 2007 9:33AM]

Pc- 7200rpm HD -Boot time, about 1m 30s
Macbook-5400rpm HD- under 20secs

Says it all really doesnt it?

[josh @ Oct 8th 2007 11:04AM]

Not really. What services do you have enabled on your PC and what daemons start at boot on your Mac? What OS version are you running on either? How sanitary is your PC (i.e. do you practice skeptical computing or do you have a crap ton of malware running on your box?).

On my primary Vista box I have a number of extra services installed that I use for personal development projects (IIS, Sql Server Express), but personally I couldn't tell you have fast it boots, because the only time I do a fresh boot is when I install the monthly patches (yep, I only have to install patches once a month), and then it usually has updates to configure. The rest of the time I use hybernate (for the uninformed, this is a proper power off, rather than a sleep mode), which restores my system in less than 10 seconds despit there being 3 gigs of ram. Granted I have a pretty fast primary hard disk, but it is also nice that I have the option to choose exactly which hard disk model to use.

Only people who don't know any better or don't actually have the option chose to do a full shutdown. Hibernate is the prefered choice when powering down completely because not only does it restore faster, it preserves application state.

[iomatic @ Oct 8th 2007 11:19AM]

Hibernate?

Yeah, I do that on my crap Dell.

I prefer to simply close my MacBook Pro....

[John @ Oct 8th 2007 11:32AM]

Just FYI, he's talking about a desktop system, so he can't quite "close the lid". Also, if you never bothered to check, you can select from amongst a variety of options for default close behaviors on a windows laptop - including - gasp - hibernate.

[jilie @ Oct 8th 2007 9:49AM]

maybe osx boots faster because has lot less options,settings, and features then Vista?

[Nathan @ Oct 8th 2007 10:44AM]

are you living under a rock? have you ever used os x? OS X is just based off of superior unix-like kernel. Look at the most stable systems in the world (unix, linux, bsd, os x, etc.), they are all made to be networked by nature, they are all built on highly scalable architectures...

windows? windows is as big as it is because of a licensing fluke in the 80's and the the non-need for average people to be able to network their computers for the first 15-20 years of home pc use.

yes, i am oversimplifying, but come on... read a little.

[josh @ Oct 8th 2007 11:19AM]

You aren't oversimplifying, you are pretty much flat out wrong. I find it amusing that you are asserting the superiority of a design that originated in the 60s, rather than that of NT which originated in the 90s and had the benifit of 30 years of OS research (it was one of the first widespread implementations that used a microkernel, as well as one of the most powerful HALs at the time). As for scalability, just including BSD in that list proves that you aren't all that clued in. Most flavors did not support true SMT until the past 5 years. It was one of the few things linux zealots could toot their horn about compared to BSD in the late '90s. That alone limited it's ability to scale, and show the artifacts of the now 40+ years of legacy design mentality. OS X, admittedly, did leapfrog BSD in that regard when it was originally built, despite being initially based on it. That said, on single box multi-core systems you don't really see OS X surpassing 4 cores, whereas windows server (which shares the same basic kernel as the consumer lines since xp, albiet it customized for different applications) and linux scale to a far greater number of cores.

In terms of base reliability, when running mature drivers, windows very easily holds its own. Reliability issues, in ALL of the OSes you listed, typically arise from 3rd party code that runs in kernel mode, and that will take down linux, OS X, or BSD as readily as it will Windows.

And none of them hold a match to IBM big iron in terms of reliability and uptime. When you can hotswap processors while the system is on, then you can talk about reliability.

[rudebo @ Oct 8th 2007 9:51AM]

didnt seagate write the code ? is this their way of admitting they are incompetent ?

[jtc970 @ Oct 8th 2007 10:12AM]

Holy crap, Mac users are in a frenzy today!
Remember Mac users, your hardware was made for your Macs and vice versa, there are very little compatibility checks when you have 2 choices of thing to change.

Of course your computers boot faster than Vista. Less options=less overhead

[Michael La Framboise @ Oct 8th 2007 10:31AM]

While on one hand you're somewhat right - about their being less compatibility problems w/ Macs; what you fail to understand is that MacOS its just simply more efficient then the piece of bloatware we've come to know as Vista.

I mean seriously; explain this - OS X takes give or take 30 seconds to boot on my 2.33C2D MacBook Pro. Vista Ultimate, on the exact same machine, takes over a minute to just get to the desktop and then another 30 seconds or so until it loads all the crap - and thats w/ a clean installation.

[jtc970 @ Oct 8th 2007 10:43AM]

Your OS doesn't need to be compatible with hundreds of different hardware and software and therefor already know what it has.
How long will it take for OSX to boot on my AMD X2 5600+ with third party video cards, hard drives, and ram?
I'll be waiting years for that boot.
Your comparing your Lincoln logs to my Legos, sure you could build a log cabin faster and better, but just try building an X-wing fighter AND a super cool jet powered racer.

[Juaquin @ Oct 8th 2007 1:38PM]

"Your comparing your Lincoln logs to my Legos, sure you could build a log cabin faster and better, but just try building an X-wing fighter AND a super cool jet powered racer."

Best analogy evar. You win the thread.

[Simon @ Oct 8th 2007 2:01PM]

"Your comparing your Lincoln logs to my Legos, sure you could build a log cabin faster and better, but just try building an X-wing fighter AND a super cool jet powered racer."

I would expect someone who can come up with that to know that the plural for 'lego' is 'lego', not 'legos'.

[SteveA @ Oct 8th 2007 10:50AM]

Vista loads for me from cold boot in 35 seconds. After that time, it takes 2-3 seconds for photoshop to load. My fiancee's newer iMac takes over a minute to boot and 12-15 seconds to load photoshop.

Depending on user bloat (like keeping random files off your desktop) will dramatically change load times for all O/S's. My personal best is 22 seconds for XP on my laptop, non-clean install.

lesson, mileage may vary

[mWMA @ Oct 8th 2007 11:32AM]

@josh
"Yeah, because completely replacing the entire windowing and graphics subsystem while maintaining backwards compatibility, redoing the entire networking stack to support IPv6 and a host of other new networking features intrinsically rather than haphazzardly tacking them on, implementing a far more advanced application audio framework, adding a score of new features such as ReadyBoost (incidentally, quantitatively proving that MS may indeed know something about using flash given the performance advantages), and a wealth of other reasonably large improvements is comparable to hastily tacking the Win2k shell onto the Windows 98 kernel in 6 months."

well it will only be couple more months before quiet a few of those features (networking, kernal encyption, encrypted driver & services etc) you mention that people never notice in Vista are going to be making part of XP SP3. So, in the end I get to keep XP OS and get the features that really matter. There are 2 types of users, those who like not be given simple, several click method to do simple things (XP style) and those who just want to look at pretty desktop all day (Vista style).

The only thing not being really given to XP is DX10 but hopefully that won't be long either since Microsoft will need to really decide do they want game developers in the long run to develop exclusive to DX10 or concentrate on DX9 with some additional eye candy for DX10 users. Remember even 4 years out from now the amount of XP vs Vista users will still be at least 50-50. Thus developers will always have to use DX9 development path (Majority video hardware) with DX10 optional additions (Minority).

[josh @ Oct 8th 2007 2:23PM]

Some of the features are being backported, though bitlocker (assuming that is the drive encryption you mentioned rather than the already present folder encryption) isn't one of them. The new networking stack also is not, though there are updates coming for the existing XP stack. There are a whole hell of a lot of major under the hood improvements in Vista that will never see the light of day in XP, because Vista is something like 60% new code.

Incidentally, there are, in fact, several types of users. One of those types is the group that gets wooed by pretty graphics and you are correct about that. There is the type that will stubbornly insist XP is where it is at because they don't really understand the magnitude or nature of changes under the hood of Vista and what the ramifications are (XP is interchangeable with OS X or Linux in this sentence). There are also the type that get paid based off of their technical knowledge and so actually do understand what those changes mean. Many of that crowd digs Vista for its purely technical merits. And there is a host of other types.

XP is a fine OS, I run it on my tablet because Toshiba won't release video card drivers that would allow Vista to run worth a damn on it (a shame, since tablet input support in Vista is significantly better than that of XP). It is stable and well supported. I don't knock people for using it, and I don't think everyone needs to rush off and upgrade. Personally I tell most of my non-technical cohorts to wait until they buy (or have me build them) a new computer rather than invest in a new OS for their existing machine, unless they have a good reason to upgrade now. That said, there is plenty of reason to want Vista that doesn't have a great deal to do with the fact that it looks slicker, and asserting that is the only motivation of Vista users is a little ignorant.

For me, the mklink command line utility did it for me. I may in general dig the NT kernel, but dear god it took them long enough to get something resembling a real symlink in NTFS (oh hey, btw, there are dozens of NTFS improvements that will never be in XP). That alone mitigates the fact that I absolutely hate that all programs expands IN the start menu instead of cascading out, or that it automatically sorts folders at the bottom rather than top of the list, punishing those of us who actually freaking organize the damn thing.

[josh @ Oct 8th 2007 2:28PM]

Some of the features are being backported, though the new networking stack is not, though there are updates coming for the existing XP stack. What security changes can be back ported easily will be, but things like the randomized kernel entry point map and sandboxed IE, two of the biggest changes, will not be. There are a whole hell of a lot of major under the hood improvements in Vista that will never see the light of day in XP, because Vista is something like 60% new code.

Incidentally, there are, in fact, several types of users. One of those types is the group that gets wooed by pretty graphics and you are correct about that. There is the type that will stubbornly insist XP is where it is at because they don't really understand the magnitude or nature of changes under the hood of Vista and what the ramifications are (XP is interchangeable with OS X or Linux in this sentence). There are also the type that get paid based off of their technical knowledge and so actually do understand what those changes mean. Many of that crowd digs Vista for its purely technical merits. And there is a host of other types.

XP is a fine OS, I run it on my tablet because Toshiba won't release video card drivers that would allow Vista to run worth a damn on it (a shame, since tablet input support in Vista is significantly better than that of XP). It is stable and well supported. I don't knock people for using it, and I don't think everyone needs to rush off and upgrade. Personally I tell most of my non-technical cohorts to wait until they buy (or have me build them) a new computer rather than invest in a new OS for their existing machine, unless they have a good reason to upgrade now. That said, there is plenty of reason to want Vista that doesn't have a great deal to do with the fact that it looks slicker, and asserting that is the only motivation of Vista users is a little ignorant.

For me, the mklink command line utility did it for me. I may in general dig the NT kernel, but dear god it took them long enough to get something resembling a real symlink in NTFS (oh hey, btw, there are dozens of NTFS improvements that will never be in XP). That alone mitigates the fact that I absolutely hate that "all programs" expands IN the start menu instead of cascading out like in XP, or that it automatically sorts folders at the bottom rather than top of the list, punishing those of us who actually freaking organize the damn thing.

[Matthew Hilario @ Oct 8th 2007 11:49AM]

Best thing out there that's Vista Compatible is my trashcan.

[N30 G30 @ Oct 8th 2007 11:56AM]

Apple users getting def... uhh... offensive.

Funny.

I liked the comments in the post about using a external screen for a Mac. Somehow, engadget was bashing Apple.

LOL!

Wait, what does post have to do with Apple again?