Comments on: Western Digital Releases 5mm Hybrid HDD Targeting Ultrabook Placement https://www.thessdreview.com/daily-news/latest-buzz/western-digital-releases-5mm-hybrid-hdd-targeting-ultrabook-placement/ The Worlds Dedicated SSD Education and Review Resource | Wed, 19 Sep 2012 00:33:00 +0000 hourly 1 By: Nick Leksan https://www.thessdreview.com/daily-news/latest-buzz/western-digital-releases-5mm-hybrid-hdd-targeting-ultrabook-placement/#comment-12752 Wed, 19 Sep 2012 00:33:00 +0000 https://thessdreview.com/?p=56848#comment-12752 I have been waiting and waiting to buy new mech drives, not for my laptops but for my “big rig” desktop (3930K/R4E/GTX670FTW/fully liquid cooled/etc), as the stuff currently available just doesn’t seem worth the price, and the stuff that would be worthwhile is way too expensive (I’m looking at you, 500GB/1TB WD 10krpm Velociraptors!). The Momentus XT has long held my eye but just seems to fall short in that, even in RAID, you only get 16GB of NAND and 1.5TB of storage for $250….

I will be going with a regular rotating disc drive (2x 1TB WD RE4’s when the 1TB platter drives arrive) for “storage-storage” such as movies, photos, etc, but I need a fast solution with large capacity and relatively low price as a “scratch drive/array”.
I am really hoping that a drive becomes available, either 2.5 or 3.5, that has something like 1TB of storage on-disc using a single 1TB platter at 7200rpm with a 64-256MB regular Cache, as well as a “smart NAND Cache” of 16-32GB per drive, and fully-enabled TLER for actual, real, RAID functionality.
When a drive like that becomes available, and is less than the cost of a 1TB drive + equal-size SSD, I will buy 2 of them right off the bat for RAID0 and if they survive a few months of HEAVY usage, I will continue to expand the array up to 6 discs for a 5 disc RAID5 array with 1 hotswap spare, and I will buy the same drives in 2-3TB capacities for two 8-disc NAS’s RAID5 arrays.

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