Seagate today announced upgrades to its 2.5-in. laptop hybrid drives and released its first 3.5-in. desktop hybrid drive.
Hybrid drives combine a relatively small amount of NAND flash with traditional spinning disks along with firmware that determines where data resides on the disk based on application performance requirements.
Because the hybrid drives use spinning disk, they can provide terabyte-plus capacities, but because of the NAND flash, they can offer performance similar to solid-state drives (SSDs) with price points approaching traditional hard disk drives.
As part of today's release, Seagate also announced it will no longer sell its hybrid drives under the Momentus XT name and will now use the brand SSHD (solid-state hybrid drives) to better reflect the technology.
Seagate's 2.5-in. laptops will mainly be sold to system manufacturers, with some sales coming from channel distributors. In contrast, the 3.5-in. Desktop SSHDs will be sold exclusively through channel distribution partners, Burks said.
Desktop system manufacturers like to see a new technology proved out in the market before incorporating the technology into their computers, an issue that affected Segate's first and second-generation hybrid drives, Burks said.
"We expect a similar reaction with our desktop hybrid drives, and because we'll be the only ones with them for at least a year, we believe the channel is probably the best venue for them, and a lot of healthy business exists in channel for desktops," Burks said.
"Our customers want the highest storage capacity with the ability to access their data easily and quickly," Fredrik Hamberger, vice president of Hewlett-Packard's consumer PC business, said in a statement. "Integrating Seagate's SSHD solution into our rapidly growing portfolio of industry-leading PCs will offer our customers a superior experience while running multiple applications."
Without releasing pricing, Burks said the SSHDs would carry a $15 to $20 price premium over standard hard drives of similar capacity. For some idea of pricing, Seagate's second generation Momentus XT hybrid drive with 750GB of capacity retailed for $245.
