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| New Generation Laptop |
Seagate is now shipping a
second-generation drive that combines chip-based flash memory with a mechanical
hard disk. The combination results in a high-speed, high-capacity drive for
laptops and the fastest personal computers.
The
hybrid technology is innovative because it combines the speed of flash chips
with the low-cost and high storage capacity of hard disks. And Seagate uses
software that is smart enough to disguise the storage from the user, who will
never know if their data is stored on a chip or the hard disk. It means that
everything from games to music, video, spreadsheets, and documents will run
faster.
The
new drive is three times faster than a typical hard drive, said Joni Clark,
product marketing manager at Seagate, in an interview.
“The
user doesn’t have to worry about where the memory sits,” she said. “It can be
used in any kind of situation.”
The
first-generation hybrid drive came out in May 2010 and sold more than a million
units. No original equipment manufacturers (computer makers known as OEMs)
launched when the drives first came out. But now Seagate has lined up seven
OEMs to ship new laptops with the Seagate Momentus XT drive.
Seagate’s
drive uses Adaptive Memory and Fast Factor technologies. Adaptive Memory learns
a user’s patterns, identifying data storage patterns, and then moves the most
frequently retrieved data into the faster chip memory for quick access.
Adaptive Memory tailors the hard drive’s performance for each user and the
applications they use.
Fast
Factor technology blends the strengths of flash chips and hard drives for
faster access to applications, quick boot-up, and higher overall system speed.
The
new drive competes with stand-alone hard drives, which have high capacity but
are slower, and flash chips known as solid state drives, or SSDs. SSDs
typically cost a lot more per amount stored, or about $2.50 to $3 per gigabyte.
A hard drive can store data at 25 cents per gigabyte. Momentus XT is 70 percent
faster than the prior Momentus drive and three times faster than a traditional
hard disk. The new drive can also store 750 gigabytes of data, or 50 percent
more than last year’s model. The drives include 8 gigabytes of single-level
NAND flash chips, or double the storage from a year ago. It has double the
interface and read-write speeds of the prior product.
Clark
said that the flash portion of the Momentus XT will likely be more reliable
than SSDs, which often wear out because they have to be written and overwritten
so much. Those are taxing tasks when it comes to reliability, whereas the
Momentus XT uses the flash chips as a read cache more so than for writing. And
if the flash chips fail, it isn’t catastrophic. The hybrid drive would then
function as a normal hard drive.
The
Momentus XP 750GB drive will sell for $245 and is available at online retailers
Amazon, Canada Computers, CDW, Memory Express, NCIX, Newegg, and TigerDirect.
The drive isn’t made in Thailand so supply shortages due to floods have not
affected its availability.
