Hybrid drives represent the dawn of a new technology, but flash memory without disk is going to see little take-up in laptops, PCs or servers, Seagate says. That is despite the fact that the company intends to hedge it bets by itself shipping a disk-less flash drive for laptops, next year.
That plan to ship an all solid-state drive was revealed by Seagate CEO Bill Watkins, this summer, when he said that the company is prepared to transform itself in order to survive changes in the enormously tough disk drive market.
Those who continue to live by the sword will get killed by a guy with a gun, Watkins told Forbes magazine this summer when he also described efforts to step up its sales into consumer applications.
Seagate’s first hybrid devices are designed for laptop use only. So far Samsung — which happens to be a flash chip maker — is the only other disk drive maker to have begun volume shipment of hybrid laptop disk drives.
But other drive makers, including the dominant laptop drive supplier Hitachi, have already announced their membership of a Hybrid Drive Alliance, and have been citing an IDC estimate that by 2010 35% of all laptop drives will be hybrid devices.
This is the dawning of a new hard disk drive technology. We expect to see it on laptops, desktops, consumer electronics, and enterprise servers in ten years time, said Melissa Johnson, Seagate product marketing manager.
The new drive is called the Momentus 5400 Power Savings Device, and it adds 256MB of flash memory to a choice of hard disk drives ranging in size up to 160GB.
The device will cost laptop buyers around 25% to 30% more than an equivalent non-hybrid drives, the biggest of which costs around $130. For the extra cash, buyers are being promised faster boots, longer battery life, better application performance, and greater reliability.
Seagate said that its hybrid drive is shipping in volume to Sony, which is offering it as an option for its laptops, and that other OEMs are already planning to do the same.
The drive maker claimed that its hybrid drives will cut boot times by 20% and increase application performance by about 10% typically.
Because the platters will be spinning less often, hybrid drives will offer around 50% longer mean time before failure than conventional drives, according to Seagate.
The life of flash memory is restricted by the relatively limited number of times that memory cells can be written into before they lock up. But Seagate said that the caching algorithm in Windows Vista on writes the most frequently accessed or most effective data into the flash of a hybrid drive, so limiting the number of writes. Currently Vista is the only operating system that recognizes flash in hybrid drives.
Less workload for the platters also means that the drive will consume 50% less power, according to Seagate, which said that a Sony Vaio laptop fitted with a hybrid drive has an average battery life of around 4.5 hours – up from 3.5 hours for the previous model that used a conventional drive.
But disk drives consume only a small fraction of the total power used by a laptop, and Seagate admitted that other factors such as a better battery or more efficient processor might well have contributed to the longer battery life for the new model.
While it is readying its own solid-state laptop drive for shipment next year, Seagate says it is not expecting huge take-up of the device. Its starkest argument for this is about cost. Most buyers won’t want to pay more for less capacity, said Johnson.
Disk drive densities and capacities are set to continue their exponential growth rate, and by 2009, a hybrid drive combining 250GB of disk with probably 1GB of flash will cost around $60, Seagate said.
Per-GB flash prices are also falling fast. According to researcher iSuppli, since 2003 the per-GB price of flash has been dropping at around 50% per annum, and will continue to reduce at about that rate over the next few years. But flash prices have to fall from a relatively stratospheric altitude. Currently a 32GB all-flash laptop drive costs around $550.
Assuming a 50% price fall each year, the $60 that Seagate says will buy a 250GB hybrid drive in 2009 will buy around 15GB of flash drive that year. Even if it bought four times that amount of flash memory, it would still be no contest for the huge majority of laptop buyers, Seagate argues.
Other arguments that Seagate makes are about the majority of laptop buyers’ unwillingness to spend money on super-compact machines – where flash might play well – and about forecasts that laptop prices will continue to fall, so making the high cost of flash memory even more of a disadvantage.
But if all that is true, why is Seagate planning its solid-state drive? It just depends on usage. That’s why we’re going into the flash market. We’re agnostic about the technology, Johnson said.