Was china the only region they had to wait for ? I assume china was important because lot of the manufacturing happens there but these are still both USA companies?(if that is still possible to call these big companies by a specific country :P), I guess all ok in Europe/USA/...?
Is it me or have these big Hard Disk makers still not produced any SSD for consumer market? I know Seagate makes some but rare or more business oriented and then there are the hybrid disks. I grew up with Western Digital , Hitachi(gone) , Samsung (gone) , Matrox (gone) , ... :P
China was just the last in line to sign off. Previously approval had been granted by stockholders in both companies along with national regulators from: U.S., EU, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Turkey and South Africa.
Prior to granting approval the US did block Tsinghua Unigroup (backed by the Chinese govt and the corporate/investment arm of Tsinghua University whose status as a research center causes it to sometimes be referred to as China's MIT) from buying a 15% stake in the combined entity.
People working for one of the involved companies in those countries. If they're on the list, it means that at least one of the companies is running offices/factories/etc there. Assuming neither company had a very large presence in those countries it was probably mostly a pro-forma review on their part. ("Do you intend to heavily cut back or close operations here after the merger?" "No." "OK. Have at it").
IF OTOH either company had a major presence in one country (I don't think this is the case) and that company thought the deal would be bad for people in it; they'd have as much right to require modifications to or to forbid the deal as regulators in your country or mine.
It is a travesty that there are still no decent hybrid drives on the market. It should add only minimal cost to add 64 GB of flash to one of these cheap 5400 RPM notebook drives. But what do we get? 8 GB of flash? And they tack like $20 onto the price.
64GB be mostly pointless for your avg user, generally you only need 8GB read cache as booting your OS and opening office applications does not use 8GB (talking normal use case not gamers) it be nice if writes would use the cache but that would complicate things and as most activity on a client pc is reads and its very easy to do (technically the SSHD can do 2 IO operations at once if 1 read hit comes from the cache and 1 write or read from disk)
an SSHD should boot up nearly as fast as a SSD (after 2 reads it learns which LBA blocks are been used the most and copies them to the 8GB cache more reads on one LBA area of the disk the more likely it not get evicted from the cache)
With sleep finally implemented reasonably robustly in Windows, booting up faster is not a useful savings for the average user, but loading up your basic apps is. But office, outlook, web browser with their shared system libraries, plus typical browser cache use are going to be far more than 8GB. And this is assuming perfect intelligence on the part of the caching algorithm. Without that, a simple 64GB read/write purge-least-recent cache would be far more effective for everyone.
Seconded, from experience. You do not even need that much. I have a 32GB SSD used as cache through intel's Z68 mechanism on a 2TB HDDs. I've been using that setup for over 2 years. This gives me the best of both world. Fast boot/program access and mass storage, all in a single volume and for a low price. At the time I bought this SSD, TB SSDs were mostly a pipe dream. Now, you could make a case that going full flash would be better (if a bit more expensive). It has worked great for all those years. Intel's solution works great and is fairly robust.
(most people don't use sleep) chrome cache hits be so low they never end up in the SSHD cache if they do it only be a small % of it (most WebPages are re-downloaded especially HTTPs ones)
opening windows and daily office applications does not do 8GB of read operations, if it did it be Extremely slow, booting your OS and opening your daily apps be lucky if it's less then 1GB any more application loading times would be mega slow, so 8GB is plenty,, now if you throw games into the mix then that’s when it can get a bit tricky with SSHDs as you can end up evicting most of the mostly used parts of programs and mostly used parts of your OS in some cases from your cache but again it does not take long for the drive to relearn the most used parts of your disk again back into the cache
The caching algorithm is very simple if the same LBA block is read more then once cache it
the first gen SSHDs it taken 3 reads before it was cached and any new 3 reads would evict the oldest cached data (a defrag would some times reset the cache to efficacy an unlearnt state)
the second gen SSHDs are slightly smarter at keeping constantly used data in the cache, it typically learns very fast as it dedicates the a part of the cache for constantly read stuff (hard to evict form cache like OS and commonly used programs that have say 10 or more reads will not be evicted easily) then the rest of the cache is issued for dynamic read caching so second read is cached immediately on the second gen Seagate SSHDs
I say games consoles is best place for SSHDs but they have there place in laptops as well (if you need more then 250gb then SSHD is a way to go as a 1TB SSHD is far cheaper then a 500GB or 1TB SSD and you get most of the benefits of the SSHD)
The new 1TB SSHD (ST1000LX001) that has 32GB of cache seems interesting as you could fit practically all game data (automatically) in that cache without it evicting other OS and productivity applications at any time (unless you really tried very hard) and its an SED drive as well (but at £85 I can get a 480GB SSD and properly twice as much a 1TB one, but if your using a laptop or a PS4 with 1 bay it is an easy buy)
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18 Comments
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plopke - Monday, May 16, 2016 - link
Was china the only region they had to wait for ? I assume china was important because lot of the manufacturing happens there but these are still both USA companies?(if that is still possible to call these big companies by a specific country :P), I guess all ok in Europe/USA/...?Is it me or have these big Hard Disk makers still not produced any SSD for consumer market? I know Seagate makes some but rare or more business oriented and then there are the hybrid disks.
I grew up with Western Digital , Hitachi(gone) , Samsung (gone) , Matrox (gone) , ... :P
DanNeely - Monday, May 16, 2016 - link
China was just the last in line to sign off. Previously approval had been granted by stockholders in both companies along with national regulators from: U.S., EU, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Turkey and South Africa.Prior to granting approval the US did block Tsinghua Unigroup (backed by the Chinese govt and the corporate/investment arm of Tsinghua University whose status as a research center causes it to sometimes be referred to as China's MIT) from buying a 15% stake in the combined entity.
http://www.nasdaq.com/article/western-digital-sand...
plopke - Monday, May 16, 2016 - link
aha thx , nice readMichael Bay - Tuesday, May 17, 2016 - link
>Turkey>South Africa
Who even cares.
DanNeely - Wednesday, May 18, 2016 - link
People working for one of the involved companies in those countries. If they're on the list, it means that at least one of the companies is running offices/factories/etc there. Assuming neither company had a very large presence in those countries it was probably mostly a pro-forma review on their part. ("Do you intend to heavily cut back or close operations here after the merger?" "No." "OK. Have at it").IF OTOH either company had a major presence in one country (I don't think this is the case) and that company thought the deal would be bad for people in it; they'd have as much right to require modifications to or to forbid the deal as regulators in your country or mine.
Eden-K121D - Monday, May 16, 2016 - link
Will we see more Hybrid drives because of this ?vladx - Monday, May 16, 2016 - link
If they pack decent SSDs won't be a bad idea at all.Murloc - Monday, May 16, 2016 - link
they own all the ingredients but it's easy to mess up an acquisition and not make use of the advantage.Impulses - Tuesday, May 17, 2016 - link
Shades of AMD/ATI? It can definitely go either way...Samus - Tuesday, May 17, 2016 - link
In this case WD is healthy with a good track record of acquisitions, and when AMD acquired ATi, they were not.Shadowmaster625 - Tuesday, May 17, 2016 - link
It is a travesty that there are still no decent hybrid drives on the market. It should add only minimal cost to add 64 GB of flash to one of these cheap 5400 RPM notebook drives. But what do we get? 8 GB of flash? And they tack like $20 onto the price.leexgx - Tuesday, May 17, 2016 - link
64GB be mostly pointless for your avg user, generally you only need 8GB read cache as booting your OS and opening office applications does not use 8GB (talking normal use case not gamers) it be nice if writes would use the cache but that would complicate things and as most activity on a client pc is reads and its very easy to do (technically the SSHD can do 2 IO operations at once if 1 read hit comes from the cache and 1 write or read from disk)an SSHD should boot up nearly as fast as a SSD (after 2 reads it learns which LBA blocks are been used the most and copies them to the 8GB cache more reads on one LBA area of the disk the more likely it not get evicted from the cache)
ABR - Tuesday, May 17, 2016 - link
With sleep finally implemented reasonably robustly in Windows, booting up faster is not a useful savings for the average user, but loading up your basic apps is. But office, outlook, web browser with their shared system libraries, plus typical browser cache use are going to be far more than 8GB. And this is assuming perfect intelligence on the part of the caching algorithm. Without that, a simple 64GB read/write purge-least-recent cache would be far more effective for everyone.frenchy_2001 - Friday, May 20, 2016 - link
Seconded, from experience.You do not even need that much.
I have a 32GB SSD used as cache through intel's Z68 mechanism on a 2TB HDDs.
I've been using that setup for over 2 years.
This gives me the best of both world. Fast boot/program access and mass storage, all in a single volume and for a low price.
At the time I bought this SSD, TB SSDs were mostly a pipe dream. Now, you could make a case that going full flash would be better (if a bit more expensive).
It has worked great for all those years. Intel's solution works great and is fairly robust.
leexgx - Tuesday, May 24, 2016 - link
(most people don't use sleep) chrome cache hits be so low they never end up in the SSHD cache if they do it only be a small % of it (most WebPages are re-downloaded especially HTTPs ones)opening windows and daily office applications does not do 8GB of read operations, if it did it be Extremely slow, booting your OS and opening your daily apps be lucky if it's less then 1GB any more application loading times would be mega slow, so 8GB is plenty,, now if you throw games into the mix then that’s when it can get a bit tricky with SSHDs as you can end up evicting most of the mostly used parts of programs and mostly used parts of your OS in some cases from your cache but again it does not take long for the drive to relearn the most used parts of your disk again back into the cache
The caching algorithm is very simple if the same LBA block is read more then once cache it
the first gen SSHDs it taken 3 reads before it was cached and any new 3 reads would evict the oldest cached data (a defrag would some times reset the cache to efficacy an unlearnt state)
the second gen SSHDs are slightly smarter at keeping constantly used data in the cache, it typically learns very fast as it dedicates the a part of the cache for constantly read stuff (hard to evict form cache like OS and commonly used programs that have say 10 or more reads will not be evicted easily) then the rest of the cache is issued for dynamic read caching so second read is cached immediately on the second gen Seagate SSHDs
I say games consoles is best place for SSHDs but they have there place in laptops as well (if you need more then 250gb then SSHD is a way to go as a 1TB SSHD is far cheaper then a 500GB or 1TB SSD and you get most of the benefits of the SSHD)
The new 1TB SSHD (ST1000LX001) that has 32GB of cache seems interesting as you could fit practically all game data (automatically) in that cache without it evicting other OS and productivity applications at any time (unless you really tried very hard) and its an SED drive as well (but at £85 I can get a 480GB SSD and properly twice as much a 1TB one, but if your using a laptop or a PS4 with 1 bay it is an easy buy)
leexgx - Tuesday, May 24, 2016 - link
(ok not SED supported)milli - Wednesday, May 18, 2016 - link
The new ones like the ST1000LX001 have 32GB of flash and they were released a while ago.zodiacfml - Wednesday, May 18, 2016 - link
Flash will takeover soon especially when most of the device wielding people gets even faster internet connections.