What’s the best storage money can buy?

HDD + SSD…When the two fuse, you get the best storage money can buy.
By Joni Clark, Sr. Product Marketing Manager – Seagate PC Client products

Beyond performance and capacity, SSDs and HDDs will fuse into one very intelligent and reliable storage device.   The bottom line is that each device alone has limits and when you combine them they compensate and even overcome their individual restrictions.

For the HDD or Disk Drive, capacity is king and performance is good but not instant.  In fact, HDD manufactures typically increase RPMs to gain performance and that can cause higher power consumption, more heat and louder acoustics.  Performance and responsiveness gains without the extra baggage are the benefits that solid state or NAND flash technology can enable for storage.

For the solid state NAND flash, performance and reliability seem to be the key value propositions while capacity and price tend to weigh down the acceptance.  But what many consumers don’t realize is that SSDs have performance degradation and loss of data retention that can lead to slower performance and capacity reduction.  That’s right, I really hate to break your solid state hearts but SSDs do lose their ability to hold performance levels and their ability to hold on to your data over time due to broad virtualization and wear.  By not writing all data to the NAND flash portion of the drive and mirroring smaller, harder to get to pieces of only your favorite files, the combination of HDD and SSD can maintain your “New PC” performance feeling and keep your data retention for the long haul.

When you combine the two devices with the right kind of programming (data management algorithms such as the Adaptive Memory^TM Technology in the Seagate Solid State Hybrid Drive) you can mitigate the risk and design faster, larger and more reliable storage that either one can deliver alone.

For additional perspective on this…check out Storage Newsletter’s “Two Opinions on Future of HDD vs. Flash on Mobile Devices: Tom and Gerry …”. The article features a discussion between Gerry Purdy, Ph.D., Principal Analyst with MobileTrax, and Tom Coughlin of Coughlin Associates on the future of notebook storage – Flash vs Disk… or both?

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