Seagate Believes in a Hybrid HDD Future, not an SSD One

By the sheer number of SSD-related news posts that get put up in a given day, it’s easy to imagine that almost everyone, and every company, are confidently standing behind the technology. But, that’s not entirely the case, especially where mechanical hard drive vendors are concerned. Though Western Digital began releasing consumer SSDs earlier this year, lead competitor Seagate has not.

Instead, Seagate released what it calls a Hybrid HDD earlier this spring, which packs in 4GB of flash storage and backs it up with a large density drive. The idea is that since no one handles massive amounts of data all at once, except for large data copies, the drive would almost feel like an SSD, but still have the huge amount of storage that pretty much everyone wants to see.

Seagate’s design isn’t perfect, at least when people demand the sheer speed that true SSDs offer, but it doesn’t matter, because the company feels that it’s Hybrid HDDs that are in the future, not SSDs. It’s easy to say, “Of course Seagate says that, it has no real part in the SSD market”, and while that’s true, there are some real concerns that make me wonder if that isn’t going to be the case.

The fact right now is, NAND pricing is not plummeting nearly as quick as we need it to, in the sense of triggering mass adoption. Things have gotten much better over the past year, but we still have a ways to go. When a hard drive could be had for around $0.05 per GB, and an SSD be had for at best, $1.50 per GB, it doesn’t exactly appeal to the majority of people.

There’s also the concern that NAND flash is becoming even more difficult to shrink and improve, and until some breakthrough happens, we might not see some total innovation for a little while. Ideally, SSDs are the future, but I think a lot has to happen before that has a chance of becoming a reality.

I can tell you that my SSD drive takes about 25, 30 seconds to boot now versus the 12 seconds when I bought it. And that’s just an issue more related to OS than it is specifically to the technology but again with the hybrid there is things that you can do it alleviate that so your boot times are actually as compelling one and two, three and four years down the road.