Seagate developing mutant hybrid SSD tech to bring costs down

We'd heard that Seagate was prepping its first solid state hard drives, but there was no plan for consumer-friendly products in that vein anytime soon because solid state drives cost far more to produce than the conventional variety. Recently, CEO Bill Watkins hinted that the company intends to overcome that problem by combining relatively inexpensive (but unreliable) multi-layer cells with pricier (but dependable) single-layer cells in some kind of hybrid drive technology. It's all very pie in the sky right now, but surely it's a better hope than sticking to your old fashioned ways and seeking out opportunities to sue envelope-pushing competitors.

[Via Electronista]

[allislost @ Nov 6th 2008 3:42AM]

I was just have one very important question that demands an answer from all of these SSD and HDD makers, Will You As Be At ALL?!!?

[Dan @ Nov 6th 2008 4:41AM]

What?

[allislost @ Nov 6th 2008 7:02AM]

I'm just saying that if it off US!!!! Why Don't Isn't?!!?

[dfivetwo @ Nov 6th 2008 7:57AM]

I think he's asking whether they will be USB drives?

[allislost @ Nov 6th 2008 8:31AM]

I'm actually asking about non-around THAT!

[egokick @ Nov 6th 2008 8:55AM]

Lay off the pot you smelly hippy.

[allislost @ Nov 6th 2008 10:56PM]

Hell no... i enjoy the robust favor that comes from smoking homegrown and no is gonna at be some to. The Whole Thing!!!

[Erb @ Nov 6th 2008 3:48AM]

With those adjectives, they better make some pretty freaking fast mutant hybrid drives!

[why not the LS2LS7? @ Nov 6th 2008 3:57AM]

SLC (single-layer) cells are not reliable either. They're good for around 100,000 writes. Now NOR, that's reliable. It's available at 1,000,000 and sometimes even 10,000,000 write cycles.

SLC's main advantage is it is fast to write. 3-10x faster than MLC, and much faster (for big writes) than NOR.

This hybrid system should be easy to implement though.

[Danger @ Nov 6th 2008 4:32AM]

It all depends on the company's error correction code (each company has its own flavor.) I'd be willing to bet that the industry leader will be decided on who can produce the best correction algorithms to deal with these SLC and MLC chips.

[michas_pi @ Nov 6th 2008 4:16AM]

I don't care what they create, as long as it's cheap and comes with their five-year warranty.

[Ori Matalon @ Nov 6th 2008 5:28AM]

One issue with SSDs is that they provide performance gains only in certain situations. I think that many people believe that it is \"much faster than HDD\" which is not alway true.


my comments at http://www.commentino.com/orim

[Adam Zey @ Nov 6th 2008 6:11AM]

They can use it as, effectively, a big write buffer, and solve the write-speed issues of MLC.

Intel has shown that MLC can have very good read speed rates (although not as high as SLC), but not when it comes to write.

So, imagine this: 63GB of MLC combined with 1GB of SLC to form a 64GB drive. All writes are performed to SLC, where they're copied to MLC internally as fast as possible. That way, you can sustain very high write speeds for a significant amount of data, and any gap in writing will give the drive time to move the data to slower MLC where it will reside.

I mean, how often do you write a file bigger than 1GB to a drive? And that 1GB is just a number I'm pulling out of my ass; 4GB or 8GB might be a better fit.

[earthling @ Nov 6th 2008 7:47AM]

What you have to ask yourself is this.

With the engineering and manufacturing expertise of drive manufacturing becoming a non-issue for SSD production, what place does a company like seagate have in the industry? Essentially anyone can now produce competitive storage systems, all it requires is the capitalization to purchase large quantities of memory (of whatever technology), will power, and high volume manufacturing expertise.

Any large asian company can do this at a price point that Seagate cannot compete with.