Western Digital 1TB hybrid HDD with 120 GB NAND leaks

Computer Hardware SSDs, Hard Drives and NAS
#1

We’ve just posted the following news: Western Digital 1TB hybrid HDD with 120 GB NAND leaks[newsimage]http://static.myce.com//images_posts/2013/11/myce-wd-black-1tb-hdd-120-gb-nand-95x75.jpg[/newsimage]

Western Digital will likely announce a 3 TB hard disk drive (HDD) with 120 GB NAND flash memory tomorrow. The drives were spotted at several online retailers and Western Digital seems to be trying to make it go viral.

            Read the full article here: [http://www.myce.com/news/western-digital-1tb-hybrid-hdd-with-120-gb-nand-leaks-69626/](http://www.myce.com/news/western-digital-1tb-hybrid-hdd-with-120-gb-nand-leaks-69626/)

            Please note that the reactions from the complete site will be synched below.
#2

Wow - 120GB NAND!

Onwards and Upwards

Regds, JR

#3

My experiments with the Seagate SSHDs has been nice enough - 1Tb and 2Tb - because they make an effective and low-cost speed-up for a boot-drive on WinXP for folks looking to upgrade any system with drive-bay limitations. But those are 8Gb NANDs and while I see programs load up faster and faster during a day’s accumulated sessions, it won’t be anything like 120Gb proportioning.

Much better. The 3+Tb range should be an exciting option for pure storage drives (as opposed to boot drives with their 2Tb limit).

#4

Most people wouldn’t use a 1TB hdd in their lives …
And sticking $100 worth of ssd into a storage drive is just … silly.

But hey, I’ll let the free market decide, and then point and laugh.
If anything, I’m patient :wink:

#5

The home-media servers are a good reason for massive storage, especially as a method to combat DRM and the always-on “requirement”.

It doesn’t do much to cure folks of collector-itis, though!

#6

$40 off on Amazon, if that reaches your country: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GSJ9X4Q/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00GSJ9X4Q&linkCode=as2&tag=dairan-20

I know I’m a home-media guy, albeit surrendering complexity by simply going with an iTunes spool. NAS is letting me down, so the idea of bringing an SSD plus 1TB into a single slot of a MacMini is simply outstanding.

#7

I’m wondering how Disk Maintenance will be performed. “Just say no” to defragging of SSDs meets “yes please” for HDDs. Something tells me TRIM will be responsible for handling all of that. TRIM 2.0.

#8

Where does it say it’s 120GB NAND inside HDD? Both Amazon and WD say just “dual” drive of 1TB plus 120GB SSD. That sounds like two drives, physically separate.

Which of the two do you think makes sense?

  1. Making HDD faster by adding higher capacity NAND chips onto its internal board

  2. Making SSD cheaper by replacing previous-generation NAND chips with latest-generation ones

The first option makes it faster by 5%. There are some noticeable access time improvements, but you can do better by increasing the size of the DDR-SDRAM on motherboard and using some of the RAM space as cache for HDD. The NAND cache does not make the platters run any faster. The bytes are read and written the same way as pure HDD. The fact that it is so easy to make SSHD look so much faster than HDD actually proves conventional HDD is outdated, ancient, and should been abandoned at least one full decade ago. You pay about 2x as much to gain 5% performance improvement.

The second option by comparison can potentially make it cheaper by 500%, or more by around the time 4TB SSD becomes ubiquitous. But it also makes it faster by 500%.

What I mean is, it’s sane to focus on SSD because it’s easier and cheaper to make 4TB SSD sell at 4TB HDD price than to make 4TB HDD perform at 4TB SSD speed.