alt Hacker NewsSeagate's new hybrid drive raises some old questions
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I used to have one of their 2.5in hybrid drive in a laptop. Seemed to work well for games. But once SSD's became cheap the tech was not longer worth it. Also, 2.5in drives topped out at 2TB of storage, while NVME and 2.5 Sata SSD's continued to grow in size.
> According to PCServerParts, a Seagate Exos 24TB drive that sold for $298.99 in the summer of 2025 was priced at $699.99 by August 2026.
Spoiled Americans. That drive is $1393 (14160 SEK) here in Sweden now[1]. A year ago it was 4160 SEK...
Three times as expensive in 12 months seems true for most drives.
I'm just praying no drives in my NAS are going to crap out anytime soon...
"According to Seagate’s press release, the Alkemi intelligent storage platform takes a different approach. Where Apple’s Fusion Drives used tiering managed by macOS, Alkemi manages the storage pool directly from the enclosure."
Soooooo... it's gonna be like the old days of Drobo, where a little VXworks box did all the heavy lifting of BeyondRAID and transparently exposed it as a big ol' block device to your OS? Good times.
I've often wondered why there aren't any (that I'm aware of anyway) Linux hierarchical storage managers (HSM). I realize they are typically used in big iron with things like tape as the base level of storage, but especially when it looked like Optane was going to be a thing it seemed like spinning<->SSD<->Optane<->RAM could be a huge performance opportunity. Though, I guess that's a "layering violation"... Honestly, at this point we've gone almost entirely SSD except for our ZFS backup servers, and that layering violation already has an SSD and RAM cache in it...