Seagate Expects 80% of HDDs to Be Hybrids by 2015

Back in may, Seagate presented a fairly well-made combination between the two main storage devices that PCs use today, namely HDDs and SSDs. The product goes by the name of Momentus XT and is a Hybrid drive, or a hard drive with 4GB of solid state storage built into it. The quarterly conference call between Seagate and financial analysts reportedly had a high-ranking executive saying that the drive is in high demand. But what most stuck out was his prediction that Hybrid drives would practically become mainstream in five years.

The 7200RPM Momentus XT has capacities of 250GB, 320GB and 500GB, as wel as the aforementioned 4GB of flash storage and a buffer memory of 32MB. It was received quite well by reviewers, no doubt thanks to its average latency of 4.17ms and 11ms random read seek time. Random write speed time is also a noteworthy 12ms, whereas I/O data transfer rates reach 300MB/s. Furthermore, the storage device comes with the Adaptive Memory technology, which moves frequently used information into the flash memory, for quick access.

"We feel really good about the [Momentus XT] product and I think as I have said on occasion looking out five years I would not be shocked if 80% of our portfolio is hybrid. [...] We believe that the hybrid drives [...], the drives where you basically utilize silicon technology in combination with HDD as probably by far in a way a better solution for the vast majority of client computing," said David Mosley, executive vice president of sales, marketing and product line management at Seagate.

The company official said that SSDs still have benefits for PCs and enterprise applications, but their cost per gigabyte is high. Hybrid drives, on the other hand, though cheaper, consume more power and their flash memory has a limited number of write cycles, which raises question regarding its durability. Nevertheless, Mosely believes that such solutions will make up 80% of the HDD market in five years.