[CONFIRMED] Seagate buys Samsung's disk drive business


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  • Technology from Samsung HDDs should improve their products
  • Special supply agreements with Samsung for NAND - aka Seagate is going after SSD business

 

I just thought of a benefit here. If there is an agreement with Samsung for NAND, Segate may be able to produce more efficient drives with hybrid technology.

 

I can't express how much I love the seagate hybrid 500GB 2.5" drive for my laptops.

It's like the best of both worlds.

Now if this technology were used in 3.5"s with a larger NAND cache. It could change the scope of the market.

 

 

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SSD's aren't going to be replacing hdd in the storage market for a decade or maybe ever.

 

Do you really believe that?  Of course neither of us are in a position to know for sure, but I'm certainly not basing my business around the assumption that HDDs will rule the market for the next ten years.  I see no reason to assume that SSDs are exempt from Moore's Law.  Granted, HDDs aren't either, but if SSD's speed increases at the same rate as their capacity, then HDDs are going to feel awful slow in just a few year's time (in fact, they already do to me).

 

I'd buy an SSD for my desktop when I can get 120GB for under $100.

 

This leads me to the thought that perhaps you haven't spent a lot of time with an SSD as a boot drive yet.  Worlds of difference, my friend, especially on a laptop where boot time, battery life, heat, and shock resistance are critical.  I wouldn't even consider building a computer (desktop or laptop) without an SSD as a boot drive these days.

 

That said, I also love the Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drives and use one as the boot drive in my digital DJ kit.

 

I can't wait to build my first SSD server.  In fact, I've already started.

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SSD's aren't going to be replacing hdd in the storage market for a decade or maybe ever.

 

Do you really believe that?  Of course neither of us are in a position to know for sure, but I'm certainly not basing my business around the assumption that HDDs will rule the market for the next ten years.  I see no reason to assume that SSDs are exempt from Moore's Law.  Granted, HDDs aren't either, but if SSD's speed increases at the same rate as their capacity, then HDDs are going to feel awful slow in just a few year's time (in fact, they already do to me).

 

10 years, that's an awful long time with the way technology moves.

I think magnetic media will be around for a long time as we need cost effective reliable archival storage

 

I'd buy an SSD for my desktop when I can get 120GB for under $100.

 

This leads me to the thought that perhaps you haven't spent a lot of time with an SSD as a boot drive yet.  Worlds of difference, my friend, especially on a laptop where boot time, battery life, heat, and shock resistance are critical.  I wouldn't even consider building a computer (desktop or laptop) without an SSD as a boot drive these days.

 

That said, I also love the Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drives and use one as the boot drive in my digital DJ kit.

 

I would agree with Raj here. Once you put an SSD as your boot every day drive, you'll see the reason to divide up your storage between el rapido and el storageo. LOL.

 

I predict we'll see more hybrid drives coming out soon.

The momentus XT is a class act drive. Well worth the money and it bridges the gap until SSD's are even more cost effective.

 

Queeg, that's 500GB with 4GB SSD read cache that may make you consider the effort.

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Here's the Seagate hybrid drive that Weebo, myself, and others are raving about:

 

Seagate Momentus XT ST95005620AS 500GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s with NCQ Solid State Hybrid Drive -Bare Drive

 

I think I got mine for around $95 shipped on sale.  While it isn't as fast as a standard SSD (since the SSD portion only benefits reads, not writes), it still makes a noticeable difference versus a standard 2.5" HDD.

 

I would love to see Seagate's acquisition of Samsung (which has a well established SSD line) result in many more of these hybrid drives.

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I can easily see SSD's taking a long time to catch up to HDD's strickly on a $$/gig ratio. SSD prices really haven't been dropping much in the last year or so while I've been watching them looking for deals. To me, memory prices really aren't moving very fast right now. I bought a 8gig USB stick on sale for about $20 when I put the stereo in my car about 2.5 years ago and when I look at new ones there are 16gig USB sticks that can be found for about $16 but there are no 32gig USB sticks listed at that price. I don't expect to see 32gig USB sticks at that price for another year give or take.

 

IC manufacturing is approaching the minimum feature size (easily) possible so Moore's law will most likely come to an end some day, or at least the time for the number of transistors doubling will begin to increase. Even if the size/pricing does follow Mooe's law of doubling every 2 years that's going to take quite a few cycles for SSD's to catch up to HDD's. Right now you can find 64gig SSD's for a little more than what a 2T HDD costs. So, how many 2-year size doublings will it take for SSD prices to catch up to hard drives? I count at a minimum of 5 2-year cycles. This Moore's law of doubling every 2 years also explain why in 2.5 years the similar priced USB sticks have only increased in size by 2 times.

 

You also have to remember that we have seen a large drop in PC component pricing due to changes in production to reduce the cost, which we won't be seeing again. For example, motherboard pricing dropped from the $250 range to the $100 range in the last 5 years or so but we're certainly not going to see the same tech motherboards drop to $20 in the next five years. There are certain components that are always required to make that motherboard and the costs of manufacturing have been leaned out about as much as possible. Also, hoping for that kind of further price reductions doesn't look good when you consider the energy and resource price increases we've been seeing the last few years.

 

So, SSD's will keep taking over the boot drive market in the future and that will likely push HDD demand down or prices up. However, the HDD company aquisitions of late will offset some of that by removing 2 manufacturers from the marketplace and allowing the other 2 manufacturers to keep up their volumes for the next number of years. I don't see SSD's taking over all storage duties any time soon, especially for the home or average business user. However, there will be more expensive SSD enterprise solutions that are adapted based on speed. I can see these enterprise SSD solutions being used more as buffers to the larger storage pool (similar to a larger version of the Seagate hybrid drive).

 

Peter

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

I can easily see SSD's taking a long time to catch up to HDD's strickly on a $$/gig ratio.

IC manufacturing is approaching the minimum feature size (easily) possible so Moore's law will most likely come to an end some day, or at least the time for the number of transistors doubling will begin to increase. Even if the size/pricing does follow Mooe's law of doubling every 2 years that's going to take quite a few cycles for SSD's to catch up to HDD's. Right now you can find 64gig SSD's for a little more than what a 2T HDD costs. So, how many 2-year size doublings will it take for SSD prices to catch up to hard drives? I count at a minimum of 5 2-year cycles. This Moore's law of doubling every 2 years also explain why in 2.5 years the similar priced USB sticks have only increased in size by 2 times.

 

Peter

 

 

Thanks for being a breath of fresh air in this silly argument.

 

 

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SSD's aren't going to be replacing hdd in the storage market for a decade or maybe ever.

 

Do you really believe that?  Of course neither of us are in a position to know for sure, but I'm certainly not basing my business around the assumption that HDDs will rule the market for the next ten years.  I see no reason to assume that SSDs are exempt from Moore's Law.  Granted, HDDs aren't either, but if SSD's speed increases at the same rate as their capacity, then HDDs are going to feel awful slow in just a few year's time (in fact, they already do to me).

 

I'd buy an SSD for my desktop when I can get 120GB for under $100.

 

This leads me to the thought that perhaps you haven't spent a lot of time with an SSD as a boot drive yet.  Worlds of difference, my friend, especially on a laptop where boot time, battery life, heat, and shock resistance are critical.  I wouldn't even consider building a computer (desktop or laptop) without an SSD as a boot drive these days.

 

That said, I also love the Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drives and use one as the boot drive in my digital DJ kit.

 

I can't wait to build my first SSD server?  In fact, I've already started.

 

Got em lining up to buy an SSD based media server?  Using a single SSD or hybrid drive in a computer really doesn't substantiate an argument that SSD's will replace high capacity hard drives any time soon.  Try again.

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With two players we'll have a duoploly.  All too often there is a long stalemate and prolonged status quo, while the two vendors enjoy relatively high profits.

 

Trouble is none of the HDD vendors are making money. Same with RAID card manufacturers all going bust or getting swallowed up. Been happening for a long time. 

 

I wouldn't even consider building a computer (desktop or laptop) without an SSD as a boot drive these days.

 

Having had to throw away two netbooks because of knackered onboard SSDs recently. I'm actually wishing they had HDDs, at least I could change them (they both have integrated onboard SSD drives). This is perhaps a bit unfair but who says I have to be fair.

 

;-)

 

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I wouldn't even consider building a computer (desktop or laptop) without an SSD as a boot drive these days.

 

Having had to throw away two netbooks because of knackered onboard SSDs recently. I'm actually wishing they had HDDs, at least I could change them (they both have integrated onboard SSD drives). This is perhaps a bit unfair but who says I have to be fair.

 

;-)

 

 

I wouldn't consider a netbook that had onboard SSD chips either.

I might buy one that had a 2.5" drive then swap that out for a 2.5" SSD though.

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Got em lining up to buy an SSD based media server?  Using a single SSD or hybrid drive in a computer really doesn't substantiate an argument that SSD's will replace high capacity hard drives any time soon.  Try again.

 

I'm not offering them for sale yet, so I have no way of knowing.  What I do know is that everyone has different needs, and I see a market for SSD based servers just like there's a market for HDD based servers....if you don't see that, I won't argue it any further.  I'm only saying that it seems imprudent to put all one's eggs in the slow and steady HDD basket when the SSD market is spreading like wildfire.

 

Until SSDs can sustain as many write cycles as a magnetic disk, they cannot be a viable replacement.

 

I don't agree.  Media servers in general (especially unRAID servers) are typically used in WORM (write once, read many) applications.  SSDs are perfectly capable of handling this.

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Until SSDs can sustain as many write cycles as a magnetic disk, they cannot be a viable replacement.

 

I don't agree.  Media servers in general (especially unRAID servers) are typically used in WORM (write once, read many) applications.  SSDs are perfectly capable of handling this.

 

I didn't say that there wasn't a market or any viable applications for SSDs - I was saying that SSDs cannot make magnetic disks obsolete, at any price, until the problem of limited write cycles is overcome.

 

Yes, if you know that your data is reasonably static, you can use an SSD to store it.  Would an SSD be okay for the parity drive, which has more writes - probably.  Would it be okay for a cache drive - maybe, because it's not used for long term, storage (though some data is vulnerable until the next 'mover').

 

Would you put a swap partition on SSD?  Possibly, but not alongside critical data.

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Would you put a swap partition on SSD?  Possibly, but not alongside critical data.

 

I've read this is the perfect application for SSD's as it provides very rapid random access.

Back in the days when we had 64M Roku's it was recommended to use a Compact flash as a swap partition.

Yes, they failed every now and then, but still allowed a very small machine to perform very well.

 

In the meantime I use an SSD for the boot/root drive of an adminstrative server, an XBMC machine without issue.

I've also used one as a virtual drive for a VMware windows XP and VMware Windows 2000 instance simultaneously without issue.  Certainly smartd reported uncorrectable sectors growing daily, but after 2 years the drive still has not failed.

 

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