Storage of the Future Hybrid drives

Storage Of The Future: Hybrid Drives.

By Qushawn Clark
Expert Author
Article Date: 2011-12-06

In the past few months, many hard drive manufacturers have been looking at marrying traditional and solid state drive technology.

Nowadays, there is a lot of talk about solid-state drives, which are more or less very large, more permanent implementations of the USB flash drive. These drives have no moving parts, have much faster access times, and are less vulnerable to shock. These are probably some of the reasons that they are offered as an option now by just about every computer manufacturer on the market. However, because the technology is newer, they are more expensive per Gb of space, which is definitely a turn off for many people.

These new hybrid drives are a nice compromise between the two options. They are composed of a traditional drive of magnetic disks, with a small solid-state cache that will store frequently accessed to data to allow for super fast lookups on that data. One drive that particularly stands out is the Seagate Momentus XT, which has an 8GB cache with a drive capacity of of 750GB and will cost you about $245. This price may seem a little steep for 750GB, but when you consider that fact that many solid state drives with less than 600GB of space will run upwards of $1000, the price may not seem so bad anymore.
While these drive clearly cannot have some of the advantages of a true solid-state drive, such as the increased durability, they are a whole lot fast than traditional drives for no much more money. To see some tests by Seagate comparing the new hybrid drive to 7500 rpm HDD and an Intel SDD go here and be amazed. The hybrid disk may just surprise you with how fast it actually is.

About the Author:
Qushawn is a staff writer for the iEntry Network.