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Samsung ships hybrid hard drive

7 March 2007 8:15 by Rich "vurbal" Fiscus | 7 comments

Samsung Electronics Co. announced today that it has begun shipping its first hybrid hard-disk drives that mix conventional magnetic storage with flash memory. The new laptop hard drives are designed to work with the ReadyDrive feature in Windows Vista, using the flash memory as a cache to limit the amount of time the hard drive spends spinning. Samsung claims this will mean 70% - 90% less power consumption. Currently only Windows Vista supports ReadyDrive, so it won't improve performance under any other OS.

The first 3 models from Samsung are 80GB, 120GB, and 160GB, and are available with either 128MB or 256MB of flash memory. They also have a prototype with 4GB of flash memory. Later this year Intel is expected to start selling their own competing solution which puts the flash memory on the motherboard.

Source:
Computerworld

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Mr-Movies (Member) 7 March 2007 8:30
Seagate and WD both already have these in production for notebooks as well. I like how the marketers have to change terminology from cache to flash you got to love them, not. It won't be long and your OS will be on a flash drive or smart card. [ + quote]
DarkJello (Senior Member) 7 March 2007 9:39
I think it would be flash memory serving as a cache for the hard drive... [ + quote] This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 7 March 2007 10:21
SProdigy (Member) 7 March 2007 10:20
ReadyDrive works a little differently than your typical 16mb cache. I really enjoy my 250gb Seagate Sata 3G. I wonder how much ReadyDrive will boost performance, as my current drive is pretty quick, compared to everything but the Raptor. [ + quote]
ZippyDSM (AfterDawn Addict) 7 March 2007 14:03
Originally posted by SProdigy: ReadyDrive works a little differently than your typical 16mb cache. I really enjoy my 250gb Seagate Sata 3G. I wonder how much ReadyDrive will boost performance, as my current drive is pretty quick, compared to everything but the Raptor. http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=2917&p=7 basic RYD test,I would think better cacheing would offer 20-50% better data "handling" but then again cacheing helps speed things you've done once already for a OS or large game this could be a amazing boost in speed but focusing on sheer drive speed/interface would be a better stick for mesuerment ,I think. think about it if a OS could set aside data in the cache of a HD fr tasks like booting and and such it could help speed up things...or am I think of ramm? L [ + quote]
club42 (Member) 7 March 2007 15:43
Darkjello is right. Its just flash memory serving as a cache. I agree that it won't be long until flash memory advances enough to have flash-only hard drives. Much faster. [ + quote]
zack2005 (Newbie) 9 March 2007 7:07
I already have a MSI mainboard that will allow a USB device BOOT !! [ + quote]
Mr-Movies (Member) 9 March 2007 8:18
Zippy you could stripe your drives (RAID 1) to get simular HDD access increase but of course you'll need at least a couple of drives which gets a little spendy, this being a cheaper solution and less RAID headaches possibly. [ + quote]