Hybrid Drives Finally Reach Market

March 9, 2007: Samsung has finally released its first hybrid drive, promising increased laptop performance, respectable data storage capacity and big reductions in power consumption.

Optimised for Windows Vista, the drives come in 80GB, 120GB and 160GB flavours and include either 128MB or 256MB of onboard NAND flash memory

Samsung claims that 2.5 inch MH80 drives can improve boot and resume speeds by 50%, and add up to half an hour to battery life as they consume up to 90% less power than a regular hard drive. The flash memory is used as a data cache for the drive, stopping constant spinning up and down of the platters as the operating system reads and writes data.

256MB of flash may not seem like enough, however, it is more than enough to store frequently accessed files and cut power consumption. As the drives become more common demand will also push the amount of onboard ram up closer to that of conventional flash memory devices which are currently sitting around 2 – 4GB.

Samsung says that this new range of drives represents the optimal space between capacity, performance and price.

The company has so far shipped the drives to its OEM customers and claims they will hit the consumer market shortly.

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